Roots in the Air: New & Selected Poems Book

"Progressive, passionate and unfailingly feminist, Kaufman is a breathtakingly fine poet...." The Nation

Publishers Weekly

In this intelligent selection of work spanning 26 years, Kaufman sensitively addresses lives which, like the title poem's Bengal ficus, persist despite adversity: Eastern European immigrants, families in love and conflict and, especially, Jews and Palestinians in Israel. Kaufman is adept at revealing the human face behind politics, carefully accumulating familiar details to make a large portrait of suffering, as in "Waiting": "Someone is sweeping the refuse/ in the aisles. Someone is torching/ a car in the next block. Someone/ is shooting into a gang of boys./ Someone is slashing open a woman with a knife." Steeped in a sense of personal and national history, the work culminates in the cogent, essential poems from her 1993 collection, Rivers of Salt, written after she moved from Seattle to Israel. Although some travel poems use place merely as a vehicle for message, the 13 new poems generally face aging and mortality with powerful restraint. Kaufman notes in "Ganges": "It's the past I look into,/ but the past keeps growing." Her acute, original observations convey the obligation, despite the difficulties, of the human conscience to situate itself knowledgeably in history. (July)