Blind Messiah

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of education at the University of
Prince Edward Island and Honorary Chief of the Mi'kmaq of Prince Edward
Island.

Shel Krakofsky, who teaches English, loves words, especially unfamiliar,
eclectic ones. His poetic mood is variously tender, bitter,
tongue-in-cheek, whimsical, sensuous, plangent. Yet his muse is heir to
an earlier culture, a Judaic one, with all its own matching contemporary
Hebrew vocabulary. Sometimes a single synonym suffices, as in “The
Computer Typist.” But in comment pertaining to customs and practice,
recourse to a larger referent is necessary, as in “The Eyes of
Tashlich” or “A Lubavitch Epithalamion.” Wisely, Krakofsky
provides a bilingual glossary as an appendix. His own distinction
between the two cultures is shrewdly expressed in “Myself in
Translation.” He is not afraid to take sides, as he reveals in the
superbly ironical “The Quintessential Christian.” Krakofsky is a
consummate scholar poet.