Review: J.J. Steinfeld's Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds: Poetry New and Selected

               The son of survivors of the Holocaust, J.J. Steinfeld challenges what and why we remember in his 2014 collection, Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds: Poetry New and Selected. Steinfeld’s poetry captures how a past that he did not experience necessarily shapes him.

                With imagery that morphs fluidly, Steinfeld’s work places the reader in his dreams, where time constantly entraps, repeats, and telescopes. In “Sometimes I Dream in Yiddish” he imagines what he would have done to change what happened to his parents and their communities. This is just one of several poems—like “Identity Dreams”, “Preparing Your Cellar and Your Attic”, and “Dreaming the History of Tattooed Numbers” —  which  focus on dreams, creating a second-hand experience that demonstrates lasting effects of the Holocaust and which encapsulates how Steinfeld feels as the son of survivors rather than as a survivor himself. The theme of being entrenched in, yet separate from, the past arises throughout the book, as evidenced in “The Inadequacy of Language and the Insufficiency of Silence” where he notes that trying to understand the Holocaust by statistics is to “bleed falsely” (54).

                In the opening piece “The Memory Travellers/ Two Photographs and Two Poems” Steinfeld questions why we “attempt to forget and remember/ in the same indispensable breath”. Steinfeld fights to convey an understanding of the indelibility of history, and acknowledge the despair he feels when others try to ignore what should not, and cannot, ever be forgotten. In this, he evokes the ideas of Theodor Adorno, arguing that to deny that culture helped produce Auschwitz is to become complicit in the reproduction of that culture (Adorno. See also Oard). Steinfeld comments on how memories change over time, consequently changing a person’s identity. His poems acknowledge how the past and present intermingle, as our memories of the past affect how we perceive the present, and our present experiences affect how we choose to remember the past.

Author J.J. Steinfeld (Photo: Brenda Whiteway)

                Steinfeld’s work is both similar and starkly different to that of other authors who discuss similar cultural atrocities, such as author Silvia Hamilton and her work on the history of slavery in Atlantic Canada. Both authors are removed from the initial traumas, but still deal with the cultural prejudices and historical amnesias surrounding the Holocaust and the Black Diaspora. However, Hamilton’s work focuses on community identity, and so looks outward and upward to the future. In contrast, Steinfeld focuses on individual identity, memory and dreams, looking inward and creating a sense of claustrophobic entrapment.

                Moving between tenderness and terror, JJ Steinfeld's Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds eloquently demonstrates the confusion the Holocaust creates in his present, and his impossible yet inevitable desire to undo pain by undoing the past.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. “Cultural Criticism and Society”. Prism. Trans. S. and S. Weber. Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press. 34-5. Print.

Oard, Brian A. “Poetry After Auschwitz: What Adorno Really Said, and Where He Said It.” Mindful Pleasures: A Literary Blog. Blogspot, 12 March 2011. Web. 05 February 2015.  

Steinfeld, J. J. Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds: Poetry New and Selected. Victoria: Ekstasis Editions, 2014.

-by Molly Strickland, with input from Monica Grasse, Sharisse LeBrun, and Benjamin Lord.  

You’re Killing Them! (Local Bookstores)

In response to Writer’s Blot article: Where Can I Buy A Book if I Don’t Use Amazon? (Or, Amazon is Not Synonymous With Books)

Is your local bookstore failing? In all likelihood yes. If so I’m sorry to have to be the one to inform you, but you’re probably the cause.

No, obviously I don’t mean you specifically the one who is reading this (except for you, Jerry.) No this is something that we have a whole have brought upon ourselves, because of a few reasons...

Now, let me hop up on my ol' trusty soap box... 

 

http://the-insane-asylum.blogspot.ca/2013/04/my-soapbox-rant.html

We are relying too heavily on sites like Amazon. Yes they have huge libraries, seemingly infinitely so, of eBooks, paperback and hard covers, but they are huge company that sells things other than books. If you buy books from them or not, they won't really feel it at all. You know who does feel it though? Small, local bookstores, the ones that are only open because of you, the local consumer.

Now, I’m no fancy economist. I am but a humble Liberal Arts English student, possibly the farthest thing from a fancy economist, but listen, we need local business. They make a community strong and sustainable.  

Not to get all hippie dippy, but in most cases local business owners are your neighbours. I personally have had very few bad experiences with any local business owner, they are so often happy and willing to help whether it be bookstores, comic book shops, things of the like, very often if they don’t have something you want, they have no problem ordering it in.

Sure yes, Amazon has great prices, I’ve seen times when books have been 5, 10 and even 15 dollars cheaper there, but that’s because they can afford it. Your local bookstore is selling books because that’s something they like and want to do, especially in an age where physical literature and literature as a whole is changing, thats a risky market, but clearly a impassioned one.

It hurts the publishers and the store when you have cheaper prices like this. Now to put my final suplex off the top ropes on this Amazon rant. Especially when it comes to eBooks, their sales hurt a lot with Amazon, with Amazon only giving 25% of the royalties to the author (and remember we're talking indie book writers, most ebook authors are new to the writing scene.)

http://roqoodepot.com/2011/09/28/walmart-of-the-web-or-the-next-evil-empire/

So is the value, or savings really worth it? Do you still feel like going to the internet giant, or would you rather go buy some books from the humans downtown. 

-TL

Review: Judy Gaudet's Conversation with Crows

          Judy Gaudet captures nature’s ability to create community in her second book of poetry Conversation with Crows. Gaudet paints her native Prince Edward Island through metaphor and imagery, producing a collection of poems which makes readers aware of nature’s capacity to teach.
          In his essay “Thoughts on Ravens, Home & Nature Poetry,” Don McKay states “it is as dangerous to act as though we were not a part of nature as it is to act as though we were not a part of culture,” an idea picked up by Gaudet through the questions the crows ask in the opening, eponymous poem:

“But wait!
Isn’t she the one
we had the message for,
something important
we had to tell?” (7).

          The combination of village communities, images of crows, and the iconic red dirt makes this a recognizably PEI production. Like a crow, Gaudet picks up, explores, and then moves on to the next shiny thing as the books progresses; for example, the crow image mutates into discussions of owls and sparrows. She also harvests “the produce of a living community” by preferring a vocabulary accessible to anyone who picks up her book (74). Following William Wordsworth’s pronouncement that true poetry uses the “language of men”, Gaudet’s straightforward diction treats topics both deep and every day. However, in places the poems' very simplicity leaves readers wishing the message was clearer.
        Where Gaudet uses binaries to create powerful, emotional meanings, her creativity reaches new heights. For example, “Equinox” contrasts the “dark shapes of the tree” to the spaces between them that “shines white with snow” (12). Similarly, “Early Waking” pairs “[l]ife and death” and “fear and love” as necessary experiences for people to use to leave their “reports” on the ground they walk (12, 22). According to Gaudet, just as nature’s seasons change, life fluctuates from positive to negative and back again.
          Judy Gaudet’s individual poems cycle through meanings found in island life, nature, and memory. But as a whole, Conversation with Crows brings all people to accord with nature by celebrating “beauty, our vulnerability/unity” (44).


 

Works Cited

Gaudet, Judy. Conversation with Crows. Toronto: Oberon Press, 2014. Print.

McKay, Don. “Baler Twine: Thoughts on Ravens, Home & Nature Poetry.” Vis a Vis. Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 1993. 30-1. Print.

Wordsworth, William. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eds.   Abrams et al. New York: WW Norton & Co., 2000. 239-251. Print.


--by Monica Grasse, with help from Ben Lord, Sharisse LeBrun and Molly Strickland.