Generations: Selected Poems

Mary Ellen Miller was a poet and Associate Professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green.

This is not the work of a novice. Rachel Korn died at 84, just before this last collection was published. An editor’s note tells the reader, “Her first poems and stories appeared in Polish. Since 1919 she has written all her work in Yiddish. During World War II she fled to the Soviet Union where she remained for a number of years until she immigrated to Canada.”

The poems here (with an unusually long list of translators) are polished, controlled expressions of loss, sorrow, love, yearning. Her fine reputation is well deserved.

Several of the poems are about writing: “The Beginning of a Poem,” “The First Line of a Poem,” “With Poems Already Begun,” “Last Night I Felt a Poem on My Lips.” All of these are good, lively, fresh, but “The Beginning of a Poem” is one of the strongest in this collection. Its last lines:

And you imagine: suddenly the world

has ripened,

And earth is mother to the lonely

wanderer’s step,

God himself, you think, would have to worship

This ultimate, ecstatic, perfect moment —

And this is only the beginning of a poem.

“Crazy Levi,” another of the powerhouse pieces, reflects this same talent for using simple language, minimal ornament, for potent effect:

And to this day, no one knows what became

Maybe the hungry wolves in the woods tore

him to pieces

or maybe his mother who hung herself in her youth missed her son, and a small, white hand

reached out to him from the dark attic of the

Rachel Korn understands free verse. One of the love poems, “I’d Love to Meet Your Mother Once,” uses the technique of repetition to accomplish its effect, as do other poems. Occasionally, she employs rhyme, but repetition, strong imagery, simple but symmetrical phrasing are her techniques.

Despite the Holocaust trauma described in many of these poems, Korn’s is the voice of a writer in love with living, with “eternal beginnings,” a phrase from “Generations.” This is the work of a real professional.