Living in the Past: Poems

by Philip Schultz

Set in Rochester, New York, in the fifties, this extraordinary book-length sequence traces the year in a boy's life leading up to his bar mitzvah and passage into manhood. There is a lively mixture of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151008728
• ISBN13: 9780151008728
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

"Today you begin to respect your fear."

Philip Schultz creates a moving balance between narrative and lyric verse in a volume that blends the narrator's memories of growing into tentative manhood with his impressions of the haunted, often crippled lives of the Holocaust survivors who populate his family's Rochester neighborhood. The volume loses some power and cohesiveness in its second half, as the narrator speaks of his adult life, but there is a great deal of thoughtful poignancy throughout this book, which convincingly portrays the simultaneous ephemeralness of our lives and the inescapable solidity of our memories and our history.