Reflected Scenery from Where My Eyes Should Be

Roger Nash is Academic Vice-President of Athabasca University and author
of Night Flying.

The remarkable strength of this first collection resides in the poems of
Jewish life, which explore the difficulty of shedding the trappings of
assimilation and claiming kinship with the Orthodox; the horror of both
guerrilla warfare and the retaliation for it; the ability to
imaginatively live in, and draw strength from, the thriving past of
one’s people; and the marvelous innocence and fragility of human
beings. These poems are made accessible to non-Jewish readers by notes
at the end of the volume.

There are difficulties to being a poet of Jewish life. The religious
traditions are so ancient, and, in their orthodoxy, so unchanged that it
may become difficult to meet them with spontaneity. What is required is
a Baal Shem Tov of poetry. In “A Blessing to be Recited Upon
Awakening,” Elias threads translated lines from a morning prayer,
which reflects on our dependence on God for health, into descriptions of
his father’s ill health. The ancient prayer “Asher Yatzar” is
thereby given a new context for meaningfulness, as is his father’s
diabetes.

Given the Diaspora and Holocaust, it is understandable if a Jewish poet
chooses silence, like Klein, rather than speaking of what seems
unspeakable. At another extreme lies the danger of falsifying horror by
romanticizing or overdramatizing it, or somehow making it
“beautiful” in poetry. Elias’s achievement, in “Incident in
Qiryat Sh’mona” and “Kiddush HaShem,” is to make poetry out of
horror, without falsifying it, in reserved and simple speech. Our sense
of horror is heightened by the implied contrast between the tight-lipped
language and the episodes described.

When Elias steps outside of recognizably Jewish life, his poetry is,
generally speaking, weak. “An Adriatic Rainstorm” avoids
romanticizing or overdramatizing young love only by collapsing into
lumps of prose toward its end. Elias himself worries over “my
senseless poem” in “Something for Karson.” The context of wider
traditions and public events, which helps shape sense in his
recognizably Jewish poems, is not appropriate to these latter poems.
Elias has not yet found, or forged, an alternative.