Poet­ry

The Bag of Bro­ken Glass: Poems

Yer­ra Sugarman
  • Review
By – January 30, 2012
Yer­ra Sugarman’s poet­ry presents a vivid can­vas of explo­ration, remem­brance, ten­der­ness, and con­nec­tion with the Divine. The first sec­tion, enti­tled Her Hands,” is a raw lamen­ta­tion for Sugarman’s moth­er. In This Moment” her moth­er breaks into the writer’s thoughts of God, I’m not ready,” with a reminder that “…this moment / is the only / moment…” while the fog out­side lifts to dis­play the soft pen­du­lum, / out­side, of the sway­ing tree.” In the titled sec­tion My Bag of Bro­ken Glass,” we learn of her family’s upbring­ing in the Holo­caust sea­son” in Poland; the poet analo­gizes square of yards of fold­ed cot­ton to “…a square / of dark­er mem­o­ry / packed in an attic of the mind / just try to take it out / a nest blown from its tree / falling lit­tle char­nel house of charred bones.…” Mov­ing into anoth­er realm of inter­wo­ven mem­o­ries, scrip­ture and rit­u­al, the author reach­es the chill­ing and potent con­clu­sion that,” Maybe this is what mem­o­ry is: God wounds.” Sugarman’s fig­u­ra­tive lan­guage and famil­iar imagery entice rather than repel the read­er into shar­ing this poet’s deeply vul­ner­a­ble and pre­cious pilgrimage.
Deb­o­rah Schoen­e­man, is a for­mer Eng­lish teacher/​Writing Across the Cur­ricu­lum Cen­ter Coor­di­na­tor at North Shore Hebrew Acad­e­my High School and coed­i­tor of Mod­ern Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture: A Library of Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism, Vol. VI, pub­lished in 1997.

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