Around 5 years ago I was lucky enough to attend a week long seminar in teaching poetry put on by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. (Thanks again to the Ann Richards Foundation for the airfare). While there we were brought to the Poetry Foundation’s poetry Library. They have the largest collection of poetry anywhere, housing over 30,000 volumes of poetry. It was overwhelming, especially because we were only there for about an hour. I browsed the upstairs shelves pulling one book after another, and reading a poem or two, then writing down the title and author if I was struck for some reason during my quick evaluation. One of the books I found on the shelves was Nelly Sachs’ Glowing Enigma. I added it to my list of books I wanted to read, then pulled another book off the shelf. The following Christmas, Lisa gave me most of the books on the list that I made in Chicago.
A few days ago, while cleaning off my book shelves, I found Glowing Enigma again. This time I read the whole poem. It is a beautiful book, strange and enigmatic (surprise! from the title). Sachs was a friend of Paul Celan, the Romanian poet who survived Auschwitz and wrote hermitic poems that are difficult to glean meaning from (at least for me), but are always worth the effort. Sachs is similar to Celan in that aspect. I am glad I found Glowing Enigma again. It was a beautiful book, filled with strangely lovely poems (or sections of a longer poem, what would you call those?) Here is one example:
How many blinking of eyelashes
when horror came
no eyelid to be lowered
and a heap of time put together
painted over the air’s humility
this can be put on paper only
with one eye ripped out—
subtext 