The Grandmother Poems - Paperback

by Marcia Katz Wolf (Author)

Marcia Katz Wolf's The Grandmother Poems operates at the fulcrum of her family's history. Some of the poems concern her parents after World War II, inscrutably altered by the Holocaust - her mother fresh from a nose job, "Queen Celeste with her trunk cut off;" her father in the cellar darkroom, "his hands rising ghostly from the developing fluid / retrieving something I could not see." Others embody Wolf's own vivid womanhood; still others, her grandchildren's first leaps, beyond the fortress of baby clothes she folds on a bed, toward unknown "frays" and "tears." The final poem portrays Wolf and her husband singing as they push their grandson Yonatan on a swing, "back and forth, back / and forth" - an image that recalls the book's motion through time. Like the grandmother herself, this collection has a long reach, and a warm, strong grasp.
Lauren Rusk, author of Pictures in the Firestorm: Poems