Solace - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Shula Chernoff’s second collection, Solace, maps what lodges in the heart with restraint, with elegance, with authority born of first-hand knowledge. Rooted in a complex history, the poems are wise and learned. In spite of the death of her husband at fifty from a heart attack which left her to raise six small children alone, and three bouts with cancer, at 93 she is a survivor—as she tells us in her poem “Treadmill”—still walking on the sloping belt, “The heat still rising in the buried life.” After more than forty years, still haunted by memory of her husband, “the curve of circling body,” Chernoff chronicles her poignant personal history, interspersing it with poems about her mother, Shoshanna, who came over in steerage from Poland to Ellis Island, and with poems about making strudel with her Tante Nesia and Tante Ida. Preserving her rich religious heritage and her shimmering lifetime celebration of Judiasm, lyrical poems about the Sabbath become a celebration of her past married love. This collection also has great geographical and historical sweep with powerful poems about a Cousin Rivka, who died in Auschwitz, and Mina Pachter and the women who perished in Terezin, who left behind a legacy of favorite recipes. Retired after a lifetime of teaching, all Chernoff has to grasp is “a December wind.” Yet, she persists. Throughout, the core subject of loss is tempered by joy, by beauty found in crimson of a Japanese cherry tree, by redemption that comes through art that, like the poems in this collection,will endure.~ Vivian Shipley, Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor

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