Darkling

by Anna Rabinowitz

In this stunning follow-up to her prizewinning debut collection ( At the Site of Inside Out ), Anna Rabinowitz has created a braided and woven language from the turbulence of multiple voices in the act of finding themselves.
Darkling is a book-length acrostic sequence a poem of accretion, of fragmented self and culture. Seeking its own process and form, it assembles narrative by way of antiphony, counterpoint, meditation, chant, repetition and epistle.
How does a contemporary poet speak in the aftermath of the Holocaust? Is it possible to evoke, perhaps even reactualize, through language, rhythms, and imagery, intimations of the past when factual details are largely lost? Can new constructs of language be generated within the constraints of a received form? Anna Rabinowitz unflinchingly takes on these questions as she looks back on the ruptured history of the 20th century. Drawing on literary roots of Thomas Hardy's ""The Darkling Thrush"" and the ancient acrostic form, she has shaped an utterly original, deeply personal work which is both armature and repository for an emotionally charged language called upon to articulate that which cannot be fully spoken.
With Darkling , Anna Rabinowitz brilliantly demonstrates that one can, indeed, write poetry after the Holocaust.

Genres: Poetry

85 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2001

Reviews

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

"abandoned and alone / each poem is a prayer" (74).

What a stunning first read of 2023. I initially picked up this collection because its title made me think of my favorite line by Keats: "Darkling I listen" from "Ode to a Nightingale." However, rather than referencing Keats, Rabinowitz derives inspiration from Thomas Hardy ("The Darkling Thrush"). This labor of love is an elegy for her family members that died in the Holocaust and those that survived, changed by grief; it is also an incredible acrostic work, with the first letters of Rabinowitz's lines assembling Hardy's verse. It was no surprise to me that the author also notably referenced beloved Rilke and Paul Celan.

Rabinowitz excavates the past, citing artifacts from a shoebox of ephemera left behind by relatives on her journey of seeking and remembering. I was reminded in some ways of Tyehimba Jess' Olio through Anna's attentiveness to form, historic imagination, and use of blank space. She confronts the double-edged nature of erasure, the desire to flee from horror but also the abyss of loss.

[Paula Koneazny · Rating 4 out of 5]

At a recent reading at Sonoma State University, Anna presented video clips of the American Opera Projects' adaptation of Darkling that ran off-Broadway in 2006 & 2007. Such a presentation of this book-length poem seems quite appropriate given the importance of song & song as a form of both secular & religious prayer in Darkling ("abandoned and alone/ each poem is a prayer"). The impetus for Rabinowitz's poetry here came from a shoebox half-filled with letters and photographs that she discovered after her parents' deaths. Darkling's fragmented "narrative" weaves back & forth among memories from the poet's childhood--particularly the difference she felt at having no relatives: "Distant cousins--everyone had one but me . . ." (almost all were murdered by the Nazis); the story of her parents' marriage, separation (it seems her mother preceded her father in emigrating to the U.S.) & life together; and fragments that serve as testimony to other lives, those that ended prematurely in the death camps of WWII. The poet's stated desire is to restore these unknown ones to their names & lives, to hear them once more, & return to them their dignity & humanity--if only for the moment of the text, the duration of the song, with its necessarily imperfect imagining of them. She writes: "how do I quote names I can neither recall nor forget?" & "they sealed their lips and left me to imagine what to forget." In a sense, Rabinowitz's parents' story is a reverse Middle Passage. They survived by making the crossing to America, unlike the many Africans who died or were enslaved as a result of crossing the ocean. Both left behind or were wrenched from families and friends. However different the impetus or outcome of their passage from old world to new, they share the experience of great loss.
Darkling is enhanced by the inclusion of several gorgeous full-page, black and white photographs of faces, those of the known and unknown loved ones: "I give you my photo, remember me--."

[Mario Santana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an extreme page turner poetic book... One that i may say had me going over each paragraph twice & even a third time as well, just to try and really figure out what this very skillful,talented & experienced author was indeed trying to dictate through her strong, powerful & mixed emotion filled words.... I must say i did find a few disturbing circumstances throughout the book (Haunted quite frankly). But that alone just kept Me inclined to compare the author's writing to a few incident's in my own life experiences... I Must Admit this was one poetry book that opened my mind,conscience & soul to another dimension.... A Must Read & I give this Wonderfully written & Illustrated Ancient Cover 5 stars...

[Elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book of poetry. Written as an acrostic of the poem "The Darkling Thrush" by Thomas Hardy, it is a combination of letters, quotes, emotions, descriptions, and metaphors, telling the story of two families separated by an ocean and struggling with anti-Semitism both in the Old Country and the New.