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A review by chalicotherex
Collected Poems by Brian Swann, Ruth Feldman, Primo Levi
3.0
Agree with Bro_Pair's review: some great poems mixed with a lot of disappointments. The animal ones, though, are fantastic. And of course the ones reflecting on the Holocaust are haunting and somber.
To be fair to Levi, he points out that he's not a poet and some of them are little more than scribblings he occasionally jotted down when he couldn't convey it in prose. And the ones that work are, despite his own misgivings, excellent. Maybe some of the best poetry I've ever read.
Favourites: Arachne, Unfinished Business, Wait, Shema, Sunset at Fossoli, Epitaph, Song of the Crow I, For Adolf Eichmann, Get Up, The Glacier, February 25, 1944, Old Mole, A Mouse, Meleagrina, The Snail, The Elephant, The Fly, The Dromedary.
Epitaph
You, traveler on the hill, one among many
Who leave marks on this no longer lonely snow,
Listen to me: pause for a few moments
Here where my comrades buried me without tears:
Where every summer, fed by me, the tender field grass
Grows thicker and greener than elsewhere.
It’s not many years that I’ve been lying here, Micca the partisan,
Killed by my comrades for my not insignificant crime,
And I hadn’t lived many more when the shadow took me.
Passerby, I don’t ask forgiveness of you or others,
No prayer or lament, no special observance.
I ask just one thing: that this peace of mine will last,
That heat and cold will alternate above me always,
And no new blood filtered through the soil
Seeps down with its deadly warmth
To wake to new pain these bones now turned to stone.
October 6, 1952
To be fair to Levi, he points out that he's not a poet and some of them are little more than scribblings he occasionally jotted down when he couldn't convey it in prose. And the ones that work are, despite his own misgivings, excellent. Maybe some of the best poetry I've ever read.
Favourites: Arachne, Unfinished Business, Wait, Shema, Sunset at Fossoli, Epitaph, Song of the Crow I, For Adolf Eichmann, Get Up, The Glacier, February 25, 1944, Old Mole, A Mouse, Meleagrina, The Snail, The Elephant, The Fly, The Dromedary.
Epitaph
You, traveler on the hill, one among many
Who leave marks on this no longer lonely snow,
Listen to me: pause for a few moments
Here where my comrades buried me without tears:
Where every summer, fed by me, the tender field grass
Grows thicker and greener than elsewhere.
It’s not many years that I’ve been lying here, Micca the partisan,
Killed by my comrades for my not insignificant crime,
And I hadn’t lived many more when the shadow took me.
Passerby, I don’t ask forgiveness of you or others,
No prayer or lament, no special observance.
I ask just one thing: that this peace of mine will last,
That heat and cold will alternate above me always,
And no new blood filtered through the soil
Seeps down with its deadly warmth
To wake to new pain these bones now turned to stone.
October 6, 1952