What the Furies BringIn the foreword to his new book, What the Furies Bring, acclaimed poet and essayist Kenneth Sherman asks, in the wake of 9/11, ‘What help is writing to the writer? What help to the reader?’ Examining the works of authors who have lived and written under great duress, Sherman suggests how writing can serve as ‘equipment for living.’ He contemplates Primo Levi’s desire to tell his story -- a yearning that kept the Holocaust survivor writing through periods of crushing depression. Sherman’s insight into the ways diary writing afforded Chaim Kaplan and Anne Frank a means to keep their sanity and humanity under the most harrowing conditions will prove inspirational to readers. In ‘The Angel of Disease,’ Sherman examines the curative aspects of writing by discussing authors who, though critically ill, persisted in their quest for the right word. Sherman’s book is not limited to writers from our past. He captures our current situation in, ‘Poetry and Terrorism,’ a prescient essay that delves into the moral and aesthetic considerations brought to the foreground since the terrorist attacks on NYC. He follows this with essays that consider whether contemporary poets and novelists have risen to the task of articulating the new age. The ‘furies’ in Sherman’s title belong to history and what they bring is not only destruction but the opportunity to transform our art and ourselves. |
Contents
Preface | 9 |
Acknowledgements | 11 |
Who Knows You Here? | 13 |
Are We Not Men? The Island of Doctor Moreau | 21 |
Rescuing Isaac | 27 |
Yiddish and the Jewish Canon | 38 |
Perishing Things and Strange Ghosts | 43 |
Poet of the Frozen Inferno | 53 |
Primo Levi and the Unlistenedto Story | 94 |
Poetry and Terrorism | 108 |
из Lowell Hughes and Bishop | 113 |
Anthony Hechts The Book of Yolek | 123 |
Poetry and 911 | 131 |
Amiss Atta | 140 |
Updikes Terrorist | 143 |
Zbigniew Herbert | 148 |
Chaim Kaplans Scroll of Agony | 63 |
Vasily Grossmans Treblinka | 73 |
Anne Frank and the Search for Self | 83 |
Milosz and the Power of Contradiction | 153 |
The Angel of Disease | 160 |
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Common terms and phrases
Ahmad American Améry Améry's Anne Frank artist asks attempt Auschwitz Beast believed Bratslav Brodkey Brooke Brooke's called camp classical Collected Poems contemporary culture Czeslaw Milosz dark dead death disease Doctor Moreau dream essay experience father feel German ghetto Ginzburg grandfather Grossman Gulag Hasidic Hebrew Hecht Hecht's Herbert historical Holocaust horror Hughes human imagination Jean Améry Jewish Jews Kafka Kaplan Kolyma language Levi's Lincoln Tunnel literary literature live Malamud's Mandelstam memory Mendel Miep Gies Milosz moral mother murder myth Nahman narrator Nazi notes novel Osip Mandelstam Ozick pain poet poetic poetry political Prendick Primo Levi prose rabbi reader reality Rupert Brooke sense Shalamov Soviet speak spiritual stanza Stevens story storytelling suffering suicide survival survivor Ted Hughes tells terror Terrorist transform Treblinka truth Updike Updike's Varlam Shalamov voice walk Warsaw witness words writing wrote Yiddish zaddik Zbigniew Herbert