Lakes of Memory and Burning Nights

Abstract

The author reviews Naomi Lowinsky’s book of poems adagio & lamentations, which begins with the lights and the shadows of her grandmother, the painter Emma Hoffman. The reader is then walked along a trail of intimate meetings with people and places, memories, ghosts, and passions, until the gods stir our anxieties and anticipations. At the center of this poetic journey stands “adagio and lamentation,” a prayer, a covenant with the dead, with the shadows, with the candles borne into the dark woods.