Chants of Indictment

Abstract

Chants of Indictment Patricia Laurence (bio) My German Dictionary Katherine Hollander The Waywiser Press https://waywiser-press.com/product/my-german-dictionary/ 80 Pages; Print, $17.00 Katherine Hollander is both a poet and historian and this twinning shines through in her first collection of poems, My German Dictionary. In this volume that won the 2019 Anthony Hecht prize, she wears a "good travelling coat" and invites us to travel and dream back and forth in English and German with her. She begins, I couldn't be a good Jew, so I triedTo be a good historian. I couldn't beA good historian, so I wrote poems. Her poems hover over a historical landscape—the Great War, the Somme, World War II, Shoah, and Weimar Berlin, and are intertwined with an internal landscape of memory, loss, death and hope. The "travelling coat," she tells you, had … a fat gold tassel at the shoulderPull on it, and from the wide sleeve a littlecedar ladder nudges out, ready to take you away. And climbing down that ladder you are taken away to places that exist on maps—"Germany is green and Russia is pink and gold" as well as to spots of memory, feeling and history that ripple with a disquiet beneath. These are poems of conviction and bravery. In "Answers to the Question in Europe" in the first section of poems, we are presented with a narrator, "I," who is made of patches of Europe, "My mother was a Polish Catholic. / My father was a Russian Jew. … When I was sixteen, I was sent away / to the south of France." She travels, sleeps, dreams through the creation and destruction of nations, and is anointed by a poet in the poem to be a living voice and to "write a letter home." She does this throughout the collection and re-imagines the terrors of history in Europe. IV.I slept under a blanket of nations… At the foot of the bed, a ladywas sewing. How the borders achedwhere her needle pierced them! Disquiet enters, After a while, I couldn't sleep. The patchworkwas coming apart, letting in the coldFrom the wide-open window…Tiny eagles and airplanes Circled the airspace over my head. VI.I met a man in a café…He said I am every poetslaughtered, every revolutionary starved.… Now you are marked with my own seal,and every wordyou write will be a letter home…to my heart like a white valentine, my sister. Throughout the collection, she welds together an outer and inner landscape that has actual geography and history as well as a transcendental reality. In the moving poem, "Sophie and Escha, 1929," two sisters living in Berlin after the Great War lead quiet working lives. Hollander beautifully captures their appearance as they emerge from a certain cultural period: "They both wear black dresses and white / dickeys. They each have a pair of maryjanes the color of black / cherries, with a mother-of-pearl button on the strap /… They are both partial to the / feuilletons [part of newspaper devoted to literature] of Joseph Roth and the cartoons of Georg Grosz. Käthe / Kollowitz makes them cry." But history sits at their table where they take opposite sides and have great arguments, Esche reads Der Jude. Sophie reads Das Tagebuch. Yet tenderly, Hollander, brings the sisters together—their brother after all having died in the Great War—and in the end they link arms and go out to the movies or zoo or theater in Weimar. But the sorrows of war, the Great War, continue and are highlighted, as Hollander recounts how the young men going off are "anointed," … sleep nowin one another's arms in the damp trenchesdrugged with death.…And the dead come in, dragging their nextwar behind them. This is the theme of Section II that amplifies the futility of death in war, and the first poem, "War Suite" strikes a personal note with its dedication, "to my brother." The image of the brother, personal or historical, continues to surface. The narrator questions "Shouldn't we have families too," and...