Jew's Harp

Here is a "new" poet whose voice breaks through in late middle age, in poems deep with memory and wide with history and writerly skill. With as sure a hand in tragedy as in humour, Walter Hess retraces the polyglot paths of exile while examining an American present and interrogating, indeed creating, a future whose borders are elective to the open in mind and heart.---Marilyn HackerThis is a book of reverence, for the dead and the living, a book of sorrow and love and praise. Hess is a survivor who can write of the vanished world.---Alicia OstrikerWalter Hess's Jew's Harp is an extraordinarily beautiful and important collection. The poet, a refugee from Second World War Europe, finds loving ground in these poems of great lyricism and power that never shy away from difficult matter, while delving deeply and movingly into history, Judaism, family, loss, music, the urban and the natural with a mastery of language and poetic form. A Jew's harp is among the oldest instruments in the world, and Hess's harp plays straight to the heart, creating a counterpoint of what is most ancient and wholly modern to produce a serene, eternal, soaring and searing music all his own.---Yerra SugarmanDespite the extreme pain and loss that's recalled so vividly, Jews Harp is a celebration of family, tradition, living through terrible and wonderful times, and memory itself. This story is about the journey from Germany to Ecuador to the ultimate settling of these German Jewish immigrants in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. The controlled lyric and narrative voice of the poems is that of a son, and grandson, speaking about his father, mother, children, grandchildren and assorted relatives. These are poems of reverence and of an open spirit toward God and His people-the poet's people too. The tendency towards form, even in free verse poems, creates the feel of ritual, a distancing required by the extremity of the subjects and emotions.---Barry Wallenstein