Rose
Black lives by the Union Pacific Railroad tracks
in Oakland, California, where she and her husband
operate Renaissance Stone, a studio and supply source
for stone sculptors. Some of the places Rose's poetry
has appeared are Runes,
The South Carolina Review, Wisconsin Review,
Hampton-Sydney Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, Spillway and
Slant.
Her book CLEARING was published in 2005 and reviewed in
the Great American Pin-Up in May 2005. Her second book,
WINTER LIGHT, was published in April, 2008. Both
CLEARING and WINTER LIGHT
were recently accepted by Yale's Beinecke Library for
the Yale Collection of American Literature. Rose is currently Associate
Editor of the Marin
Poetry Center Anthology.
Poet Moira Magneson describes Rose’s poems as a "canoe ride on a quiet lake, interrupted by a sudden, sometimes deadly, squall." In the words of poet David St. John, “Rose Black is a remarkable and heart-breaking poet. Her meditations on the passages of experience and the psychological resonances of childhood are compelling and powerful, surprising and illuminating. There is a quiet and elegant music to Rose Black’s poems, and once heard, it’s not forgotten.”
Poet Moira Magneson describes Rose’s poems as a "canoe ride on a quiet lake, interrupted by a sudden, sometimes deadly, squall." In the words of poet David St. John, “Rose Black is a remarkable and heart-breaking poet. Her meditations on the passages of experience and the psychological resonances of childhood are compelling and powerful, surprising and illuminating. There is a quiet and elegant music to Rose Black’s poems, and once heard, it’s not forgotten.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
BOOK LAUNCH!
THREE NEW BOOKS OF POEMS
Joseph Zaccardi – Susan Terris – Rose Black
Saturday APRIL 27th 4~6 PM
REBOUND BOOKSTORE, 1611 4TH Street, San Rafael
_________________________
Rose Black’s superb new collection of poems,
Green Field, is a sobering volume of recollections,
reflections and meditations upon a life’s
ravaged hopes, the echoes of a personal past,
and the raw realities of our present.
Like fables and dreams gone dark in the lens,
these poems instruct us in the complex measures
we need to employ in determining what values
still remain ̶̶ and will endure ̶̶ in our lives.
̶̶ David St. John
___________________________________________
Blenheim Street
We walk both dogs near home. One block over to Pippin Street, where
garbage overflows onto sidewalks, streets. The dogs like this best.
Treasures of rib bones, chicken bones, yellow food wrappers crusted
with cheese.
We pass the sandblaster’s place, say hello to the pit bull pup with the
chewed ear. As we pass the big apartment building, the children leave
their play and swarm us.
Those are big dogs! That one, do he bite?
He wouldn’t bite you.
Can I pet him?
Sure. He likes you to pet him like this.
Do he bite?
The children ask these questions every day.
We stop at the red carnations, stuffed bears, the eight white candles
laid out in a cross beside a wire fence. On a large piece of cardboard:
RIP Berto 1986 - April 12, 2009 Te quiero mucho Please God no
Every day. Why the dog-fights. Why the garbage. Why the murders.
Why my sadness finds this sadness.
We let our dogs in the back gate, by the dead end of Blenheim Street.
Two men stand beside a shiny car. We say hello and they don’t look
at us or answer.
When we moved to this neighborhood, Mrs. Reed around the corner
called us over, said, Welcome, gave us lemonade and cake
What is more important than protecting whatever can live? We walk
into our yard. Trees and flowers now, where once there was hard
ground. Where once, before the blight, orchards of apples and apricots
stretched from the far end of Pippin Street all the way to Blenheim.
Screen Saver
An Arctic sea. Far mountains, jagged and peaked.
A low sun just beginning. Maybe it is ending. Thin, pale.
In the distance, there might be an island.
Close up, on the shore, huge chunks of ice.
Around them the hardest of rocks: granite, feldspar,
quartz. Shades of white and gray.
The sun is just rising, or it is just setting. It could be the end
of night. Or the beginning. Deep between mountains —
crevasses, ravines. In the distance, there could be an island.
I don’t want to tell you my reasons for this choice. Why I didn’t
choose the field of daffodils, bright yellow, their smooth
leaves and stems. All facing toward light.
In the distance, a finger of black. It’s either land or where
the ice is melting. I don’t want to think about ice melting,
or notice how the spur of black has a certain shine and thickness.
I don’t want to smell the sweet, oily stench of what lies under ground,
and I don’t want to think about those who will come here.
I move through this landscape by dogsled, by boat.
In places like this, ice breaks up, ice melts. The seasons will
change. A fresh blanket of ice will grow over the land, over the sea
again, and again. Though, maybe not.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
CHAPTER & VERSE: POEMS OF JEWISH IDENTITY
Five Bay Area writers, Rose Black, Margaret Kaufman, Melanie Maier, Susan Terris, and Sim Warkov, all published poets, invited five additional published poets, Dan Bellm, Chana Bloch, Rafaella Del Bourgo, Jackie Kudler, and Murray Silverstein, to contribute to this collection of poems of Jewish identity.
Of their work, Rabbi Stephen Pearce, Senior Rabbi at Congregation Emanu-El, San Francisco, wrote:
“Carl Sandburg provides an elegant description of lyric compositions like the ones found in Chapter and Verse: “A poem is like an echo asking a shadow to dance.” This rich volume, a pastiche of the dance steps that post-modern Jews engage in with sacred texts, modern culture, and ancient traditions, tugs at the hearts and minds of the reader, inviting them to an invigorating and entrancing ball.”
In the introduction to Chapter & Verse, Jane Miller, a well known American poet and teacher, says:
“While these poems of Jewish identity by ten Bay Area poets evoke the beautiful loam and moonlight of an old world and culture, they also are blunt in reporting the terrible."
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
TWO POEMS FROM CHAPTER & VERSE:
INSIDE
they are sitting in the living room weeping, all of them shaking tears. I run from one to the other, touching hands, their knees. Don’t cry don’t cry I say. They don’t look at me. They keep on crying. The room gets dark and no one turns on the lights.
Mother and Grandpa Abe are there, and all the aunts are there. Faye, Esther, Hilda, Norma and Rhoda. The uncles, Victor and David. Lace doilies on the backs and arms of chairs.
Where is Grandma Sarah?
Something that has no business here has come into the room. Something that belongs far away from us, beyond the dining room, with table made from the box piano taken apart. Something that belongs beyond the yard, picnic table, grape arbor, horseradish tall along the fence.
Beyond the factory across the street where Grandpa presses pants, corner saloon buckets of beer. Beyond the Slotnicks, the Villasanas, the Frankels, the Einenkels and the Morris Street Shul. Beyond the empty lot with old quince trees, butterflies, wild berries.
Something that belongs far away has come inside.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
WASHING THE BODY
I walk the rocky cliffs above the Potomac
early November the maples blaze orange
and red, and when I return my brother hugs
me hard and fast and that’s how I am told.
We walk into our mother’s bedroom, check
for breath and pulse. And no one tells us
what we might do next, sit with her, wash
her slowly. We haven’t asked. Our mother’s
Jewish past would have instructed us, had
we wanted to know. Our Great Uncle Joe
could have told us that our mother would
linger awhile, near her body, confused.
From the moment of death the body is not left
alone until burial. That she must be tended
and washed. A pure act, because the dead
cannot give back. But we brother and sister
half-Jews, Jews among non-Jews, non-Jews
among Jews, we have it figured out. We call
a man to take away the body. Take it away
fast as he can, reduce it to ash and fragments
of bone. Typical weight for adult female,
four pounds. Is this what Mother wanted?
We scatter her from a bridge above Great
Falls, and who knows how far she will travel
in the cold fast river below. Where is she?
Mother, I want to wash you gently.
I want to wash you with warm water,
as children are washed when born.
I want to scent the water with myrtle,
and wash you, from head to foot.
I want to pare your nails and comb
your hair, wrap your body in a white
linen shroud, put you in a simple pine
box. Lay you in earth. Each time I visit,
I will bring you a stone, and place it
on your grave. Stone of your name.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
LINKS: