Apples from Shinar: A Book of Poems

Wesleyan Poetry Program

by Hyam Plutzik, David Scott Kastan (Contributor)

A special centenary edition of this American poet's critically acclaimed collection

Apples from Shinar was Hyam Plutzik's second complete collection. Originally published in 1959 as a part of Wesleyan University Press's newly minted poetry series, the collection includes "The Shepherd"―a section of the book-length poem "Horatio," which earned Plutzik a finalist position for the Pulitzer Prize. "The love and the words and the simplicity," that mark Plutzik's poetry, writes Philip Booth, "are all here [in Apples from Shinar], and the poems come peacefully, and wonderfully, alive." With a previously unpublished foreword by Hyam Plutzik and a new afterword by David Scott Kastan, this edition marks the centenary of Plutzik's birth and will introduce a new generation of readers to the work of one of the best mid-century American poets.

64 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1959

Reviews

[Jee Koh · Rating 5 out of 5]

For months now I have been dipping into Hyam Plutzik's Apples from Shinar in bed. The opening poem "Because the Red Osier Dogwood" inspired me to write a poem after its repetition of "because." All the poems in the book are finely weighed, with lush imagery and alluring music. Many poems are written in regular quatrains. "A New Explanation of the Quietitude and Talkativeness of Trees" convinces me that trees "belong to the genus thunder." There is an angry poem written "For T.S.E. Only" that tries to see the latter's pain in his anti-Semitism. The refrain "Come, let us weep together for our exile" tries to find common cause. The metaphysical and image-making powers of the book come together most dizzyingly, for me, in the ten-line poem "The Geese." The "miscellaneous screaming" of the birds raises the speaker's eyes to the geese pressing southward. Seeing the hopeless will of the birds to prevail against time, the poem concludes, "Value the intermediate splendor of birds."