Reviews for Alphabetical & Letter Poems: A Chrestomathy

The average rating for Alphabetical & Letter Poems: A Chrestomathy based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-01-10 00:00:00 Jacob Hauversburk A short collection of poems some of them quite rare, from a writer who I believe should have won the Nobel Prize. These range from good to exceptional, I only wish he had written more expansive poetry during his lifetime, but he has left the world a body of work that shall stand the test of time, from the viewpoint of someone who witnessed one of mankind's darkest moments, and lived to tell his tales.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-01-30 00:00:00 Andrew Hicks 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.'"