Paper Roses

Carolyn Hlus was a lecturer in English literature at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

Rachel Korn was born in 1898 in a village in East Galicia, Poland. Although most European Jews at that time lived in cities, she grew up among Jewish farmers and peasants. Her early emotional relationship with the country is reflected in her powerful and direct natural imagery and in her focus on neglected lives. She died in Montreal in 1982 after a 54-year writing career, which saw her publish eleven books and receive numerous literary prizes, among them the Manger Prize of the State of Israel. Her works have been translated into Hebrew, Polish, Russian, German, and French. The poems in this collection, a bilingual anthology of selections from Korn’s complete poetical outpourings, are divided into six sections. The poems in “Village,” “Fate,” and “Homelessness” are from her early collections. The poems in “On the Other Side of the Poem,” “Soul Landscapes,” and “Altered Reality” are from her later collections and demonstrate her move toward, structurally, abstraction, and thematically, existentialism. The poems in the last section, written after she had a massive coronary, use the invalid as a metaphor for the exile: her sufferings symbolize a larger suffering.

The poems in the early works evolve from graphically detailed character sketches to highly wrought emotional outbursts. Crazy Levi, in the poem of the same name, resides in a long melancholy because his uncle refuses to let Levi marry his daughter. Levi is said to

Profoundly imagistic, too, are the soothing words and actions of midwife Hanka at the birthing bed:

In poems like “I Wonder How Much Grief,” Korn finds no relief in the landscape:

and in “Job” her persona cries for God’s mercy:

In the poems from Korn’s later works chosen for this collection, theme is still a heavy reliance on concrete natural images, but these images, more overtly than in the early work, reveal the modernist’s awareness of art as an expression of mankind’s hopelessness. “Last night I felt a poem on my lips,” begins the poem of the same name, “a luscious fruit, sweet and tart, / but it dissolved into my blood at dawn.” In other poems, the tracks of “black crows on white fields” are “script”; “silence” teams into her preparations “for the giving of song”; and the state of her “word” is comparable to the loneliness of God:

Paper Roses is a collection of superb poetry. Seymour Levitan is to be commended for making these poems available to an English audience while preserving the original versions in the same text.