In preparation for a talk I was to give in my synagogue on the first section of Genesis--the one in which God creates the world in 6 days, including Adam and Eve, and rests on the seventh--I printed out a scholarly essay entitled, And God Created Humans. My printer, however, is very old and with every exertion, wheezes like a coal miner might after 40 years in the mine, which seems like something I could say about myself, climbing a staircase or running to catch a bus, though I can't remember the last time I took a bus. But I'm straying from the point, which is the ink did not transfer smoothly to the paper and the resulting smear and shadow obscured some of the words, such that it appeared the title of the essay was no longer, And God Created Humans. Rather, it read, And God Created Hummus.

Poetic explorations of a celebrated poet's inner world. With that three-line epigraph, David Ignatow declares the thrust and purpose of his compelling new book. Unlike his previous work, which was written largely in reaction to the world about him—the urban landscape with its clamor and violence and business pressures—these new poems turn inward. They explore and confirm the individual in his never ending search for awareness and realization: a process in which conflict, love, sorrow, and insight in the end come together into a precarious balance that is its own form of peace.

Bloch Chana..~ THE SECRETS OF THE TRIBE: Poems..~ New York:: The Sheep Meadow Press,, 1980.~ Very good+ in stiff glossy wrappers (some curling to the cover, inconspicuous black line on bottom edge.). First printing, a trade paperback, issued simultaneously with hardcover. An uncommon and very early collection by this award winning poet and translator. 59 pp.

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"The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" by Arthur Wing Pinero is a gripping drama that delves into the complexities of love, morality, and societal expectations in Victorian England. The play centers around the character of Paula Tanqueray, a woman with a troubled past who marries for the second time and must grapple with the consequences of her previous actions. As Paula navigates the challenges of her new marriage and attempts to integrate into high society, she faces judgment and scrutiny from those around her. Despite her efforts to leave her past behind, Paula finds herself haunted by the shadows of her former life, leading to tensions and conflicts with her husband, his family, and society at large. Pinero's masterful storytelling and rich character development draw audiences into Paula's world, inviting them to empathize with her struggles and dilemmas. Through Paula's experiences, the play explores themes of forgiveness, redemption, and the enduring impact of one's past choices.

. 8vo pp. 104 Molto Buono (Very Good)

A reissuing of the debut collection of poems by the noted National Public Radio commentator Andrei Codrescu.

"Titled Letter to Poetry, the book is a single coherent poem in many sections. Jean Day writes of it, In Letter to Poetry, Tom Mandel finds both Rhyme and Reason under the hood of his Coupe de Ville. Rhyme is sometimes played for winks and Reason cloaked in gentle humor ("Maybe more hot air would make it / safe to cross the brink of this thin ice?"), but the undertones are stoic, Talmudic, and wise. Poetry offers Mandel a vast formal, historical, and even autobiographical toolkit. When he writes that a metaphor is "like a noun no longer / used on that occasion," his words are both wistful and transporting. Poetry was built to perform this task"--

This new edition of poems draws from poems published during and shortly after the First World War by Siegfried Sassoon. Also included are several early poems showing his early naïve ignorance of the terrible reality of war, prior to the death of his brother in 1915 and his experiences at the front, and later Sassoon's A Soldier's Declaration, which marks his break with the military authorities. Such was the uproar caused by his statement, which was read aloud in parliament and published in The Times in 1917, that he was afterwards diagnosed with shell shock and incarcerated in a hospital, where he continued to write and met Wilfred Owen. Poems included in this edition are:AbsolutionA Letter HomeThe HeroThe Poet as HeroThe GeneralAttackCounter-AttackThe Rear-GuardWirersThe Humbled HeartPrelude: The TroopsDreamersHow to dieThe EffectA Soldier's DeclarationThe FathersLamentationsSuicide in the trenchesDoes it matter?Fight to a finishEditorial ImpressionGlory of womenTheir frailtyThe Hawthorn TreeThe InvestitureTrench DutyBreak of dayTo any dead officerSick leaveBanishmentSong-books of the warThrushesAutumnInvocationRepression of war experienceThe TriumphJoy BellsRemorseDead MusiciansThe DreamIn BarracksConscriptsTogetherSurvivorsEveryone SangThe book also includes a new introduction by Kenneth Grant introducing the reader to Sassoon's world and tracing the progress of his poetry from naive patriotism on the eve of war to something darker.

Theology is, by definition, rational discourse about God and, by extension, the rational discourse about religious matters in general. Humans are rational--though not only rational--creatures and, as such, they are ever striving to verbalize, to rationalize, and to systematize. But, if theology is rational discourse about a primary experience rather than experience itself, we are faced with the problem of whether theology can really do full justice to the primary experience. Theologians have often list sight of the fact that theology is an interpretive discipline, that the primary source of religious knowledge is human experience, and that we have in our experience only hints and intimations of God. The images and nuances of poetry may be better suited than logical discourse for capturing these hints and intimations. Alongside its technical theological tractates, Judaism has always had its prayerbook, and the language of prayer is the language of poetry. Theological systems may come and go, but the theology that is translatable into liturgy remains. Liturgical poems expressing the unconventional and the idiosyncratic share the same prayerbook pages with conventional theology, just as conflicting ideas had always shared the same pages of Talmud and Midrash, where no uniformity of theological positions was ever enforced. Ibn Ezra's advice to "pray only in a literalist manner" was hardly the advice by which Jews let themselves be guided. The poetry of the synagogue proves it. The traditional Jewish liturgy contains not only the standard prayers ordained in the Talmud and the ritual codes, but also poetic embellishments of all kinds. Such poetic embellishments, or piyyutim, take the form of hymns to be sung in conjunction with the standard prayers, and of poetic inserts in the standard prayers themselves. Jakob Petuchowski presents ten such poems in pointed Hebrew, with translation, commentary, and introduction to the theological theme of each poem. The poems-ranging from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries and hailing Palestine, Spain, France, Germany, and Italy-introduce the reader to innovative poetic expressions of unconventional and daring theological ideas that have been incorporated into the standard liturgy. This reprint edition is an indispensible introduction to piyyut (medieval liturgical poetry) for all students of Jewish thought and culture.

In the years between 1929 and 1939, when Itzik Manger wrote most of the poetry and fiction that made him famous, his name among Yiddish readers was a household word. Called the Shelley of Yiddish, he was characterized as being "drunk with talent." This book -- the first full-length anthology of Manger's work -- displays the full range of his genius in poetry, fiction, and criticism. The book begins with an extensive historical, biographical, and literary-critical introduction to Manger's work. There are then excerpts from a novel, The Book of Paradise, three short stories, autobiographical essays, critical essays, and finally, Manger's magnificent poetry -- ballads, bible poems, personal lyrics, and the Megilla Songs. These works, which have the patina of myths acquired ages ago, also offer modern psychological insight and irrepressible humor. With Manger we make the leap into the Jewish twentieth century, as he recreates the past in all its layered expressiveness and interprets it with modernist sensibilities.

Book by Pinsky, Robert

Freedom from Violence and Lies is a collection of forty-one essays by Simon Karlinsky (1924-2009), a prolific and controversial scholar of modern Russian literature, sexual politics, and music who taught in the University of California, Berkeley's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures from 1964 to 1991. Among Karlinsky's full-length works are major studies of Marina Tsvetaeva and Nikolai Gogol, Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin; editions of Anton Chekhov's letters; writings by Russian émigrés; and correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. Karlinsky also wrote frequently for professional journals and mainstream publications like the New York Times Book Review and the Nation. The present volume is the first collection of such shorter writings, spanning more than three decades. It includes twenty-seven essays on literary topics and fourteen on music, seven of which have been newly translated from the Russian originals.

Book by

This is the first book of its kind. It contains some two hundred and fifty poems by the major English and American poets from Swinburne and Hopkins to Robert Lowell; each poem is a translation of imitation of a work in a foreign tongue. Twenty-two languages are represented in this glittering collection. They range from Hebrew and classical Greek to modern Chinese, from Polish to Korean. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Richard Wilbur, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald are included--each a master in his own right, but seen here as the re-creator of another poet's voice. George Steiner believes that ours is the most beautiful period of poetic translation since the Elizabethans. Here is his evidence.--Cover