BOOK REVIEW – Poems Prickle the Political
Allan Brown, Powell River
Volume 26 Issue 7, 8 & 9 | Posted: September 17, 2012
Something Small to Carry Home
A Book Review by Allan Brown
Something Small to Carry Home
A Book Review by Allan Brown
In her third poetry collection, following Between the Doorposts (Ekstasis Editions, 2004) and Prairie Kaddish (Coteau Books, 2008), Isa Milman demonstrates that the political can be fully at home with the personal. Her concerns extend from the pain and terror of “my parents’ long exile, out from the Gulag” (“I’m Search for the Keys to the Hostel in Vienna, 1946”) and “how bullets sprayed everywhere” (“This Photo”) to a resolution of her family’s past and her own present in the easily familiar “The Year Hitler Came to Power, My Mother Turned Sixteen” and her hesitant yet somehow confident prose poem “Letter to Anne Frank, June 12, 2004.”
Many of the pieces here address or develop from other writers – not so much her sources as her associates. The group includes her stylistic model, Charles Wright, her “rebbe” Leonard Cohen, and Patrick Lane who taught her how “Poetry is Fiction.” The best crafted of these parallel voices is that of the almost voiceless Paul Celan whose suicide is recreated as a gleaming “corona of silence” that is simultaneously life-filled with “the taste of butter cake” and death-directed as “He… entered the river beneath his cold kitchen / his mouth full of ash” (“For Paul Celan and My Father: A Sestina”).
Her poems, though always securely based on familiar ground, also jetison upward and outward, “leap after leap, frozen in jete, her perfect pointed feet in crimson slippers” (“Palindrome for Tante Manya”).
Allan Brown is the author of 23 volumes of poetry.
Allan Brown, Powell River