Shirley Glubka

After Paul Celan Shirley Glubka

What can be done with language in the wake of the Holocaust? This was a core question for Paul Celan-poet, Jew, survivor-as he wrote in German, the language so brutally misused by Nazis. He answered with a body of difficult, brilliant work.

Shirley Glubka, approaching Celan's poetry for the first time in her 70s, found herself writing as well as reading: "reading-through-writing." She worked in the ekphrastic tradition, producing twelve poems, each inspired by one of Celan's, "as if I stood before a challenging, compelling painting, perhaps one bordering on the abstract, and found lines of a poem forming-description, interpretation, meditation, or something that flew off quite into its own sky." Twelve brief essays followed, companion pieces for the poems. Glubka offers these poem/prose pairs, "deeply conscious of my debt to Paul Celan," with an introduction based on her reading of Celan's famous "Meridian" speech. The result is an unusual, carefully crafted, thought-provoking collection.