The Bag of Broken Glass

By Yerra Sugarman

"Yerra Sugarman's first book Forms of Gone marked the appearance of a mature poet with an invaluable world-view, that of a daughter of Shoah survivors settled in Canada interrogating and recreating a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1931357587
• ISBN13: 9781931357586
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: Sheep Meadow Press
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.5" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Elegant, lyrical, a universal voice.......

Yerra Sugarman's work here is reminiscent of an Old Testament psalmist, giving voice to the dark peripheries and wounds of life with lyrical grace and quiet elegance. Through skillful poetic forms and simple words, she creates powerful moments in time. Whether inhabiting the ancient past, detailing a troubling presence, or looking to an unknown future, she speaks with a universal voice. "Through the Portholes of the Eyes" expresses eloquently the grief and fear of watching her dying mother prepare for the end of life: But I could no more unclench my stare from her being than untangle my fear that in dying she was also forgetting my name. In "My Bag of Broken Glass" the poet contemplates Poland of 1939 and Canada in 1978. These two excerpts from that poem reflect the stunning clarity and beauty of Sugarman's memories of fear and death in Poland, love and survival in Canada: Beneath the blood bitter moments, are there only blowing voids or brittle essentials? Words fall like long hairs on her mind's floor. Images get caught in memory's teeth. Surgarman entwines an individual sorrow with the universal in "Journal: Rai'ut Coma Ward, Tel Aviv-Yaffo, July 2003." Her mother's youngest sister languishes there in an unconscious state: To connect the body's pain with the pain of the body's world like the hand's double, its shadow on a leaf of paper in this coma room's caul of light -- But you don't wonder who tenders the bitter or who measures the weeping and the ravaged. History bears you in its unconsummated peace where it always stops and you retreat from the world not knowing your history or yourself. In "Sacred are the Broken" the poet memorializes the legacy of Ruth Apteker, a half-Jewish, half-German woman whose greatest accomplishments and possessions were resurrected from a dumpster: The body can die alone on an uptown stoop, seeking refuge from its bug-filled studio. And the damned, duplicitous mist will weave a pall from its once soft cloak. You see how we're born: solitary, dying, holy, broken. And sacred are the broken, the inconstant, the distracted genius, curmudgeon, refugee, and the one who would offer an only pair of good shoes to a victim of fire. Critics have described the poetry in this book as invaluable, extraordinary, eloquent, luminous and masterful. Such praise is understatement. The Bag of Broken Glass has my highest recommendation.

VIBRANT, ORIGINAL

Two of our National Treasures, Michael Palmer and Marilyn Hacker, who some might simplify as having opposite poetic aesthetics, have deeply praised poems in this second book. What Sugarman has in common with these two ground breaking Master Poets is a devotion to language, philosophy, image and lyric searching. Sugarman's lines echo our most contemporary concerns: "But what happens/when language can no longer bear us?" Buy this book!

Beautiful and transcendent

The words "achingly beautiful" rarely ring true for me, but in the case of Yerra Sugarman's poetry, they are absolute. While her exploration is often through an autobiographical lens, what is so wonderful about Sugarman's work is how it transcends her own experiences. Love and grief are, after all, universal, and there is nothing in her work as a whole or in this collection that requires a particular cultural understanding or a particular loss in order to find one's way in.

The Bag of Broken Glass

I was very excited and looking forward to reading this book! In the realm of contemporary poetry, her use of language and poetic form is nothing short of brilliant. This book spoke intimately to me of grief and loss, religious questioning, holocaust and history with the tint of a suffering that I am familiar with. What was so great about this book is that she is able, through her poetry, to give meaning to the grief - with an artistry that transcends the difference of personal history for the reader. This book fosters a deep compassion for reflection. I think anyone who has experienced loss or suffering will admire this book and if they are lucky enough not to have experienced that yet in their life they will admire it for it's artistic merits. She is one of the most talented poets I've read.