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Adagio & Lamentation
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky was the first child born in the New World to a family of German Jewish refugees from the Shoah. Many in her family were lost in the death camps. It has been the subject and the gift of her poetry and prose-to write herself out of the terror, into life.Naomi had a special tie with her only surviving grandparent, the painter Emma Hoffman, whom she called "Oma." Oma showed her that making art can be a way to transmute grief, a way to bear the unbearable. The cover of Adagio and Lamentation is a watercolor by Emma Hoffman-an interior view of the Berkeley home where Naomi visited her often as a teenager. Oma tried her best to make a painter of her, but Naomi was no good at it. Poetry was to be her vehicle.Adagio and Lamentation is Naomi's offering to her ancestors, a handing back in gratitude and love. It is also her way of bringing them news of their legacy-the cycle of life has survived all they suffered-Naomi has been blessed by many grandchildren.
112 pages, Paperback
First published June 10, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 18, 2010
De profundis
ADAGIO & LAMENTATION is a collection of poems, the title bearing connotations of sorrow and 'music played slowly', by a rather extraordinary poet - one Naomi Ruth Lowinsky. By training she is a Jungian analyst, but she also is committed to her passion for poetry, not only as a now widely recognized and lauded poet herself, but also as the poetry and fiction editor of Psychological Perspectives - a marriage of talent if ever there was one! Lowinsky writes from the perspective of the scribe remaining to record the effects of the Shoah (Holocaust) on not only her ancestors but also on the minds and souls of people throughout the world scarred by that indelible tragedy. But Lowinsky seems to not find it necessary to recreate the horrors of that event but rather to assure us that it will not be forgotten, that transplantation of her surviving ancestors to the New World holds moments of joy and life made more rich by the presence of that devastation in their history. Perhaps the title poem from this collection best describes her melding of memory, influence, and present state:
ADAGIO & LAMENTATION
when my father's fierce fingers made Bach flow
our dead came in and sat with us a ghostly visitation
and my grandmother sang lieder of long ago
this is how prayer was said in my childhood solo
piano arguing with god adagio and lamentation
when my father's fierce fingers made Bach flow
music accompanied us into the valley of shadow and lo
Bach was torah Mozart was our rod Schubert led us into contemplation
my grandmother sang lieder remembering long-ago
my child's soul was full of glimmerings the glamour of the gone the glow
of candles borne by children into the dark German woods the illumination
of the evergreen all this I saw and more when my father's fierce fingers made Bach flow
my mother's dead sister my grandfather in a cattle car woe
permeated shadows stirred the curtains took up habitation
in my grandmother's body filled every song she sang with how she longed for long ago
long gone now my grandmother my father although
sometimes I call them back by villanelle by incantation
come my fierce father play for me water my soul in Bach's flow
sing my sad grandmother your song is my convenant with long ago
There are so many superb poems in this collection, some of them being the absolutely magical: 'at 19 before she became my mother Havana 1939', or 'on the anniversary of her first marriage',or 'what we did today in Venice'. Music and great literature and spirituality and physical passion pour out of these pages with a golden ladle. This is some of the finest, beautifully constructed poetry written today. Highly Recommended.
Grady Harp
ADAGIO & LAMENTATION is a collection of poems, the title bearing connotations of sorrow and 'music played slowly', by a rather extraordinary poet - one Naomi Ruth Lowinsky. By training she is a Jungian analyst, but she also is committed to her passion for poetry, not only as a now widely recognized and lauded poet herself, but also as the poetry and fiction editor of Psychological Perspectives - a marriage of talent if ever there was one! Lowinsky writes from the perspective of the scribe remaining to record the effects of the Shoah (Holocaust) on not only her ancestors but also on the minds and souls of people throughout the world scarred by that indelible tragedy. But Lowinsky seems to not find it necessary to recreate the horrors of that event but rather to assure us that it will not be forgotten, that transplantation of her surviving ancestors to the New World holds moments of joy and life made more rich by the presence of that devastation in their history. Perhaps the title poem from this collection best describes her melding of memory, influence, and present state:
ADAGIO & LAMENTATION
when my father's fierce fingers made Bach flow
our dead came in and sat with us a ghostly visitation
and my grandmother sang lieder of long ago
this is how prayer was said in my childhood solo
piano arguing with god adagio and lamentation
when my father's fierce fingers made Bach flow
music accompanied us into the valley of shadow and lo
Bach was torah Mozart was our rod Schubert led us into contemplation
my grandmother sang lieder remembering long-ago
my child's soul was full of glimmerings the glamour of the gone the glow
of candles borne by children into the dark German woods the illumination
of the evergreen all this I saw and more when my father's fierce fingers made Bach flow
my mother's dead sister my grandfather in a cattle car woe
permeated shadows stirred the curtains took up habitation
in my grandmother's body filled every song she sang with how she longed for long ago
long gone now my grandmother my father although
sometimes I call them back by villanelle by incantation
come my fierce father play for me water my soul in Bach's flow
sing my sad grandmother your song is my convenant with long ago
There are so many superb poems in this collection, some of them being the absolutely magical: 'at 19 before she became my mother Havana 1939', or 'on the anniversary of her first marriage',or 'what we did today in Venice'. Music and great literature and spirituality and physical passion pour out of these pages with a golden ladle. This is some of the finest, beautifully constructed poetry written today. Highly Recommended.
Grady Harp
May 5, 2011
A delicate writing desk stands ready for use in a sunny room on the cover of Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s collection of poems, Adagio & Lamentation. The room is filled with light from the world outside the high arched window. The watercolor painting by the poet’s grandmother Emma Hoffman (“Oma”) displays a room Lowinsky saw many times as a teenager when she visited Oma’s house.
One can imagine Lowinsky working in such a room with a pen so sharp that it tears the paper, cutting through the desk's polished veneer to carry ink and light deep into the primary wood. “I wish you could stop being dead,” Lowinsky writes to Oma in the opening poem, “so I could talk to you about the light.”
The nib on Lowinsky’s pen shreds the curtain of time that conceals her ancestors and allows them to speak. “The spirit of my dead grandmother came to us as we lay after love in the renovated Old Milano on the northern California coast.” The spirit’s words in “ghost gtory” cut deep. In “Adagio and Lamentation,” the poet hears her father playing the piano while “our dead came in and sat around us a ghostly variation/and my grandmother sang lieder of long ago.”
Lowinsky’s collection of poems is organized into four sections, “before the beginning and after the end,” “what broke?,” “great lake of my mother” and “what flesh does to flesh.” With strength, certainty and intuition, the poems live and breathe on their pages, and when experienced together, comprise an ever-new song about long-ago wars, colors, shadows, moments and people.
Joy and sorrow dance slowly in the light throughout Adagio & Lamentation. From the opening invocation to Oma to the closing “almost summer," Lowinsky’s words—written with “a flicker of serpent’s tongue in her ear”—tear through the paper-thin present and drive their way deep into the underworld of the unconscious where the inspirations of her muse are fiery, erotic, earthy, transcendent and whole.
One can imagine Lowinsky working in such a room with a pen so sharp that it tears the paper, cutting through the desk's polished veneer to carry ink and light deep into the primary wood. “I wish you could stop being dead,” Lowinsky writes to Oma in the opening poem, “so I could talk to you about the light.”
The nib on Lowinsky’s pen shreds the curtain of time that conceals her ancestors and allows them to speak. “The spirit of my dead grandmother came to us as we lay after love in the renovated Old Milano on the northern California coast.” The spirit’s words in “ghost gtory” cut deep. In “Adagio and Lamentation,” the poet hears her father playing the piano while “our dead came in and sat around us a ghostly variation/and my grandmother sang lieder of long ago.”
Lowinsky’s collection of poems is organized into four sections, “before the beginning and after the end,” “what broke?,” “great lake of my mother” and “what flesh does to flesh.” With strength, certainty and intuition, the poems live and breathe on their pages, and when experienced together, comprise an ever-new song about long-ago wars, colors, shadows, moments and people.
Joy and sorrow dance slowly in the light throughout Adagio & Lamentation. From the opening invocation to Oma to the closing “almost summer," Lowinsky’s words—written with “a flicker of serpent’s tongue in her ear”—tear through the paper-thin present and drive their way deep into the underworld of the unconscious where the inspirations of her muse are fiery, erotic, earthy, transcendent and whole.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews