Many voic­es, includ­ing per­haps that of God, can be heard in Stephen Bluestone’s The Paint­ed Clock, a three-part med­i­ta­tion on the jour­ney to Tre­blin­ka — the death camp itself, and the ulti­mate des­ti­na­tion with­in the camp, the death cham­ber. With­in the camp, time stops, his­to­ry comes to an end, and even nature as we know it is abol­ished. Using Tre­blin­ka as a set­ting, Blue­stone exam­ines the human rela­tion­ship with God. Hav­ing grant­ed man the pow­er of moral choice, does God too become a vic­tim of the Holo­caust? The title poem of this vol­ume is a pow­er­ful explo­ration of the covenant, if any, between the Cre­ator and the cre­at­ed. The Paint­ed Clock stands in the tra­di­tion of Elie Wiesel and the Book of Psalms, while recall­ing Paul Celan in its attempt to com­pre­hend the Holo­caust; to pray is to go in all direc­tions at once, Stephen Blue­stone acknowl­edges, and in poems that are prayer­ful and there­fore for­mi­da­bly allu­sive, his­tor­i­cal, and ambi­tious in their for­mal­i­ties, the poet relates ​“stu­pen­dous tales…begging to be told.”