The Little Time-Keeper: New Poems

by Jon Silkin

extremely rare,very good condition

Genres: Poetry

75 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Madeline]

I was curious about Silkin's poetry because I really admired what I'd read of Out of Battle, a sharply intelligent and committed examination of Great War poetry. Silkin's work does remind me a little bit of Isaac Rosenberg's, but only a very little (and some of that resemblance is probably because my exposure to Jewish poets is sadly limited). He has his own voice, thorny and sinewy and difficult - but quite vivid. These are poems that require thought, that do not surrender to the reader, but challenge the reader. Silkin focuses on several different environments in this collection - Australia, different parts of Britain at different times, something approximately WWII Europe - but his awareness of the natural world and of human interaction with it is a constant throughout the poems. However, he doesn't write the easy kind of poetry that romanticizes nature, but an altogether more complex and bruised vision of the non-human world. (For that matter, much of his human world is quite bruised as well.)

A good read, if you don't mind this kind of poetry. (I myself find modern poetry either too boring or extremely difficult, and would not have picked this up if I didn't have some exposure to him already.)

When I talked about Out of Battle (I almost-literally drooled over this book, and Silkin's analysis, that is how good it is), the person I was speaking to nodded. "Silkin - very perceptive," he said, "a strange man, but very perceptive." These poems are kind of strange, but I appreciated their strangeness.