One of my favorite poets, Sharon Dolin, has four poems up at Nextbook. The first, "Let Me Thrum (6 a.m.)" is a wonderful fresh and new version of "Nishmat Kol Hai," the poem of nature extolling God that we read every Shabbat morning.
What makes Dolin’s work stand out for me is her exquisite ear, her ability to create a poem that would sound like music even if you did not know English, and whose sounds are intimately woven into her meaning. It’s on full display in this poem, where the early morning poet both hears and observes:
antennae’d and furred all sing all shirr all rub and buzz and fling their call to You in song-light as the mist still clings
Contrast those twittering consonants with the hollow, ominouis vowels in one of my favorites, "Regret," (not at Nextbook, but you can read it here):
Here’s another sin you’re sunk within owl-necked looking back to where you might have been
The set of poems on display on Nextbook take us through the day, into the evening light, when she asks:
O God May I still see in the violet hour
Dolin helps us see-and hear it..
[Cross-posted from South Jerusalem]
Haim Watzman
Haim Watzman is a Jerusalem-based writer, journalist, and translator, and co-author, with Gershom Gorenberg, of the South Jerusalem blog. He is the author of Company C: An American's Life as a Citizen-Soldier in Israel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2005) and A Crack in the Earth: A Journey Up Israel's Rift Valley (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2007). Haim was born in 1956 in Cleveland, Ohio and grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland. After receiving a B.A. from Duke University he moved to Israel, where he has lived since 1978 and worked as a freelance translator and journalist. His translations include Tom Segev's The Seventh Million, Elvis in Jerusalem, and One Palestine Complete, as well as David Grossman's The Yellow Wind, Sleeping on a Wire, and Death as a Way of Life. As a journalist, he has written from Israel for The Chronicle of Higher Education, the British science journal Nature and other publications. Links to articles of interest can be found here. Haim currently writes the monthly Necessary Stories column for The Jerusalem Report. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Ilana, and four children: Mizmor, a student; Asor, a soldier; and Niot and Misgav, high school students. He is an active member of Kehilat Yedidya, a liberal Orthodox community equally concerned about democracy in Israeli society and traditional Jewish values.
Contact Haim by e-mail at hwatzman@gmail.com.
Photo of Haim Watzman by Debbi Cooper
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