Irving Feldman’s extraordinary volume, "Collected Poems: 1954-2004," has been published.
Educated at the City College of New York, with a master’s from Columbia, Feldman is Distinguished Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is an overlooked treasure of American poetry:
Feldman’s rich body of work exhibits his mastery of language from the biblical to the conversational, his Yiddish flair for the comic, his profound social insight and lucidity.
His prior collections of poetry have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and winner of the Jewish Book Council’s Kovner Poetry Prize.
Here is a portion of his remarkable poem "The Return:"
But if your life were given you again . . .
— But as another turning of the maze,
or the same maze a second time;
and not the struggle you wanted,
but intricate escaping whispers
that hint (or simulate) a mystery,
and bring you . . .
toward a struggle deflected
through minute, imperative clashes,
till, circling on the infinite threshold,
your weariness and your way unite;
past, future connect in a dream . . .Yet suppose that on this
your own occluded morning . . .
suppose that over and over
your life returns,
mingling in a radiant moment
those turnings, those doorways and days,
your mumbled street of mazes . . .
you turn,
under the momentous, pouring body,
and search the doubtful passageways
(repeated, dividing), unaware
that from the first your cry was answered
and your life, and lives, are here.
Other Feldman poems have a different tone, including "Celebrities" — a single stanza that captures the unreality of fame — and “Culprit Conscience,” with its plaintive wish “to fly entirely or fall finally.”
Cynthia Ozick describes Feldman as "psalmist and satirist, elegist and stand-up comic, mandarin and graffiti artist, philosopher and town crier, romantic and skeptic.” About his poem “Pripet Marshes,” included in this profound and sparkling collection, she says this:
His heartbreaking "Pripet Marshes" will stand, in its intimate and afflicted grandeur, with Auden’s "September 1, 1939" as one of the great poems of the twentieth century.
Here is the beginning of "The Pripet Marshes," a poem that extends for several pages:
Often I think of my Jewish friends and seize them as they are and transport them in my mind to the shtelach and ghettos,
And set them walking the streets, visiting, praying in shul, feasting and dancing. The men I set to arguing, because I love dialectic and song — my ears tingle when I hear their voices — and the girls and women I set to promenading or to cooking in the kitchens . . .
And put kerchiefs and long dresses on them, and some of the men I dress in black and reward with beards. And all of them I set among the mists of the Pripet Marshes, which I have never seen . . .
It is the moment before the Germans will arrive.