The Poems Of Charles Reznikoff: 1918-1975
Department
English
Document Type
Book
Files
Description
Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976), the son of Russian garment workers, was an American original: a blood-and-bone New Yorker, a collector of images and stories who walked the city from the Bronx to the Battery and breathed the soul of the Jewish immigrant experience into a lifetime of poetry. He wrote personal memoirs, family history, and tenement tales in verse. He wrote narrative poems based on Old Testament sources. Above all, he wrote spare, intensely visual, epigrammatic poems, a kind of urban haiku. The language of these short poems is as plain as bread and salt, their imagery as crisp and unambiguous as a Charles Sheeler photograph. But their meaning is only hinted at: it is there in the selection of details, and in the music of the verse. Reznikoff was sincere and objective, a poet of great feeling who strove to honor the world by describing it precisely. He also strove to keep his feelings out of his poetry. He did not confess, he did not pose, he did not cultivate a myth of himself. Instead he created art-an unadorned art in praise of the world that God and men have made-and invited readers to bring their own feelings to it. In an age of ephemera, of first drafts rushed into print and soon forgotten, Reznikoff's poetry is a sturdy, well-wrought thing-"a girder, still itself / among the rubble." A timeless testament-impersonal, incorruptible, undeniably American-it will survive every change in literary fashion. Book jacket.
Call number in WMU's library
PS3535.E98 A17 2005 (Waldo Library, WMU Authors Collection, First Floor)
ISBN
1574232045
Publication Date
11-30-2005
Publisher
David R. Godine
City
Boston
Citation for published book
Reznikoff, Charles, and Seamus Cooney. The Poems of Charles Reznikoff: 1918-1975. Boston: David R. Godine, 2005. Print.
Recommended Citation
Rezinkoff, Charles and Cooney, Seamus, "The Poems Of Charles Reznikoff: 1918-1975" (2005). All Books and Monographs by WMU Authors. 312.
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/books/312