No Heaven

by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Alicia Suskin Ostriker's voice has long been acknowledged as a major force in American poetry. In No Heaven , her eleventh collection, she takes a hint from John Lennon's "Imagine" to wrestle with the world as it "no hell below us, / above us only sky." It is a world of cities, including New York, London, Jerusalem, and Berlin, where the poet can celebrate pickup basketball, peace marches, and the energy of graffiti. It is also a world of families, generations coming and going, of love, love affairs, and friendship. Then it is a world full of art and music, of Rembrandt and Bonnard, Mozart and Brahms. Finally, it is a world haunted by violence and war. No Heaven rises to a climax with elegies for Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by an Israeli zealot, and for the poet's mother, whose death is experienced in the context of a post-9/11 impulse to destroy that seems to seduce whole nations. Yet Ostriker's ultimate stance is to "Try to praise the mutilated world," as the poet Adam Zagajewski has counseled. At times lyric, at times satiric, Ostriker steadfastly pursuesin No Heaven her poetics of ardor, a passion for the here and now that has chastened and consoled her many devoted readers.

Genres: Poetry, Jewish

144 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2005

About the author

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry.

Reviews

[Tim Mayo · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there are no gods to give us succor in Alicia Ostriker’s collection of poetry No Heaven, the reader does find among possible alternatives: humanity. But humanity is like the unseen babies in one of Ostriker’s poems, it is “the animal premise of the whole image.” The line comes from “Baby Carriages,” and though quoted out of context, in context it suggests even more of what I believe Ostriker is striving for in this book. The poem begins describing a photo of several women passing their time together on a park bench. One can see the strollers near them, but the speaker goes on to say:

I don’t see the babies but I feel their presence
Like invisible magnets that keep the photograph from falling apart,
The animal presence of the whole image.

By the end of the poem we also know that the photo was taken during World War II, and it is being viewed by the speaker in a museum who says:

. . . Wartime, the home front,
It makes sense, I stand in front of it on the museum wall
For a long time, thinking: here’s the real story. If only.

Where can we go with such an ending? Why, just about any where. If only women ruled the world . . . if only we thought about those babies more than other things, then the big picture of the world wouldn’t fall apart as easily as it does. But also embedded in our remembrance of the poem is that perplexing reminder, “the animal presence of the whole image,” which seems to recognize that there is an animal, hence cruel, part to human nature as well.

The collection’s title No Heaven comes from the John Lennon song “Imagine,” and though it suggests a merciless place, Lennon’s song, if you remember, also goes on to suggest a humanistic solution to the world where “all the people [end up] living life in peace,” and for that reality to come true, you must first imagine it. The poems in this book range widely from personal love poems to exphrastic poems on Schumann, Ravel, Janacek (whose name I’m sure needs an odd Eastern European accent mark that I don’t know how to make nor where to put). They range on from Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus,” and to three Midrashic paintings by Caravaggio which Ostriker forges into a three part poem entitled “Caravaggio: The Painting of Force and Violence.” Lastly, there are the poems on the equally heavy, historical subject of war all of which bring us back to the consideration of her collection’s title.

Behind the inhumanity of the wars which Ostriker writes about starting with WWII and the Holocaust, then moving on to the Vietnam War and the demonstrations against it, and then from there to the current Iraq War, there is always an implied “why.” Of course, this can’t really be answered except to say that we carry a certain “animal presence” in us that we are capable of nurturing like those babies in the carriages, and it’s up to us whether we nurture them into aberrations of the human or into those imaginable people living peaceably in John Lennon’s song.

[Glenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s poems in No Heaven is like having someone who needs to impart something essential to you lean in, quietly and yet with great intensity, to show you something of utmost importance, never lecturing, never condescending, the unearthing of vital information seeming to occur in the moment of telling, so when, the payoffs in the poems themselves take place, in the burst of the revealed moment, the impact is intense and profound.

The ease of the language, it’s casualness and conversationality might make one overlook to care with which the language here is wrought;

Alicia shows relationships as clearly the commingling of two distinct entities; whether we completely understand the person we’re with or not, these poem’s simple conversations mirror the familiarity of those long together. There’s that easy connection, yet always so fragile, knowing that we must make ready to part from all we love and hold dear, and yet how we must always stay in the moment, so that what we have will not become subsumed by what we have lost, or will lose. She writes, in the poem “Mid-February”:

“Friend, it’s a day for a walk
are we going to walk it?”

…and that becomes the challenge of these poems, to have us not waste the day, not take for granted that the beauty and pain and joy and sorrow will continue ever on.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was a little disappointed with this. It is one of the few poetry books I have read that was more interesting the first reading than the second. I liked the ekphrastic poems more then the others. The writing is lovely, the themes and style seem like what I can hear at my monthly writing workshop or open mikes.