The Eternities

Kim Fahner teaches English and history at Marymount Academy in Sudbury,
Ontario.

Divided into three sections (“The Ancestors,” “The Midnight
Gravities,” and “The Dust in Bright Air”), this collection of
poems speaks to the power of love, remembrance, and hope’s
regenerative power in the face of the remembered horror of the
Holocaust. The act of remembering, however, is painful—so painful that
“[l]ove struck a merciful stake / through my reckless heart.”

The image of the trains that transported millions of Jews to
concentration camps is central to the collection’s thematic and poetic
unity. A once-romanticized version of travel is transformed,
horrifically, into transports of “strangled groans / desperate as the
bleating / of cattle penned / in Webster’s slaughterhouse” (“His
Dreams”). At the heart of The Eternities is the poet’s father, a
Holocaust survivor who is forced to deal with the ghosts of the past
that are invading his present.

Bluger’s poetry brilliantly evokes the power that resides in a
daughter’s enduring love for her father.