The mouth twisted
The mouth trying
to say the word right
in a strange language.
There is something deeply compelling, as Boland puts it, "in the way the world of the public poet encounters the hidden life of the woman in these poems." The interplay is endlessly fascinating. I'm struck by the personal way these poets confront history, test and interrogate language, especially their mother tongue, question the efficacy of poetry, and repeatedly defend the importance of private feeling. They are dark elegists who view large historical events through a focused individual lens. Their voices seem to me as necessary today as when they wrote in the aftermath of World War II.
Here is Rose Ausländer's transfiguring elegy for her mother, "My Nightingale," which now takes its place, along with Else Lasker-Schüler's "My Blue Piano," on my shortlist of the most radiant mid-20th century poems.
My Nightingale
My mother was a doe in another time.
Her honey-brown eyes
and her loveliness
survive from that moment.
Here she was --
half an angel and half humankind --
the center was mother.
When I asked her once what she would have wanted to be
