Forms of Gone by Yerra Sugarman
by
Marilyn Hacker recommends
Forms of Gone, poems by Yerra Sugarman: "
Forms of Gone is a powerful first book by a poet mature in experience and worldview, whose strength is drawn at once from a unique perspective and a multilayered engagement with the counterpoint of syntax and poetic measure. Sugarman is the daughter of Shoah survivors who settled in Canada, and her subject is the overlay and undertow of history on daily life, as it regards that very specific experience, radiating out into a meditation on the palimpsest that is any examined human existence. But first of all, there is the reality she witnessed, as the witnesses themselves began to disappear, with a novelist's (or a painter's) eye for wry or heart-wrenching detail, but with a poet's linguistic compression and invention, with a poet's genius for recreating the particular so that it also implies the human universal." (Sheep Meadow)