Description
Poetry. David Wolinsky's early poems, here gathered for the first time, many decades after they were written, have an expressive power that emanates from the poet's struggle to articulate not just his own pain but that of humanity as a whole. In The Crane Is Flying, the book's title-poem, he writes: 'My children, unborn, cry out for food, / for music... I hear their voices swelling from the future; they labor / beneath an enormous sea." Almost all of the poems in this marvelous collection, not just those for the poet's dead sister, are elegiac; yet at the same time they reach into the future, and this is the 'labor' they perform. Innsbruck I Must Leave Thee, a poem I have treasured since I first read it many years ago, begins: 'If this melody or some old chanson lodge / in the brain, sail in canonical polyphony...'; and indeed, once read, these poems will lodge in the brain, never to be forgotten.—Henry Weinfield
Author Bio
David Almaleck Wolinsky's non-career found him a novice middle-school teacher for 6 years in the Park Heights ghetto of 1990s Baltimore, and a non-blood grandpa many years later. The "body count" includes three published and four unpublished volumes of poetry, as well as a book of "translations and transformations" from Argentine Nuevo Cancion and it's musical-political cousins. Almaleck' represents his maternal lineage from Al-Andalus, Muslim- ruled Spain, where his Sephardic Jewish ancestors flourished. 1492 is remembered as The Expulsion, at the completion the Catholic reconquista. Queen Isabella brought with her the Inquisition, human bonfires and forced conversions. Fleeing Jews were welcomed by the Ottoman Empire. Among other useful delusions, he believes his activism and volunteer work (and some poems) honor the convivencia of a thousand years ago, as well as today's cries of No Justice, No Peace. David lives with his wife Lilia among the birds and the trees, rocks, rhizomes and other critters, in central Maryland.
Author City: FREDERICK, MD USA