Shema: Collected Poems of Primo Levi Book

Primo Levi survived Auschwitz, and his poems are largely preoccupied with this experience. Like many writers who deal with genocide, he must aim at communicating horrors that are virtually incommunicable. His skeletal language is stripped to a probing of fundamentals:

"Consider whether this is a man,
Who labors in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no."

In later poems, Levi examines the hardships of various figures from classical antiquity, including a remarkable poem about the death of Pliny from the ash of Mt. Vesuvius ("We're ash ourselves; remember Epicurus?").

If Levi's poems affirm any notion of eternity, it is the eternity of senseless suffering. Levi's galaxy of pain extends even to Hannibal's elephants, in a poem from 1984:

"A bold blind man tried for a long time
To find my heart with his lance-point.
I've hurled my useless dying trumpeting
At these peaks,
Livid in the sunset: 'Absurd, absurd.'"