Writing is my passion. I create poems in order to see the world more clearly, to slip inside the shadow-corners of self and other.
Through poetry I strive to make art out of pain, experience, love, and dreams. Finding the right images and words to capture the inspiration and move the reader to another place is thrilling.
Merle Nudelman is a writer, educator, and a lawyer. Her first book, Borrowed Light, won the 2004 Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Michael and Me is her sixth poetry collection. Her poems have garnered prizes both in Canada and in the United States and have appeared in various Canadian and American literary journals and anthologies including "Heartwood" Tree Poem Anthology (League of Canadian Poets, 2018). Merle teaches memoir and poetry writing and gives lectures on healing and growth through expression.
More about Merle
"It is gratifying to read poetry that cares about devotion and dignity, by a poet who is capable of lyric sensibility with bold and fearless reach. [InThe Seeker Ascends] Nudelman addresses the enigmas of illness, loss, vision and forgiveness in language lit with commitment."
"These are poems of maturity that grapple with life's terrible losses. With candour and grace, they move knowingly through pain to resilience and calm."
"With artful precision, Merle Nudelman reveals the ordinary and extraordinary moments of a child's life in a language that is both fresh and profound. What results is a poetic that transforms not only how we observe and experience those most dear to us but the concept of life and death itself. At the core, Nudelman's fourth collection of poetry is celebratory − a poetry of revival that can only come after great loss and great joy, a revival that sustains like the image of her deceased son, Michael, who now is the sturdy “oak” that “shade[s]” those who are left behind."
"With lyrical concision and emotional restraint, the fierce, elegant and sometimes elegiac poems in The He We Knew speak to the joys and losses of the human heart. These are poems that startle and haunt.”
"In her second book, Merle Nudelman writes with the accomplishment and confidence of an established poet. Her poems possess that rare combination of emotional astuteness and a penetrating depth of vision. In this volume, We, the Women, Nudelman establishes herself as a voice who speaks from the courage of an astute, caring and defiantly humane heart."
"In poems that move us from Europe in the 1930s to Canada in the twenty-first century, Merle Nudelman strings lyric pearls against a panorama of the Holocaust and a Jewish family's emigration to Canada. She filigrees a web of delicate family interconnections that holds fast despite the rending winds of war and the felt traumas that can only be recollected in peacetime. Here is a poet who knows in her bones what a lyric moment can mean, and who works in her poetry toward those gemlike instances of Borrowed Light when we fully understand what it means to thrive."
"Merle Nudelman displays an uncanny ability to link her personal history with the rich and tumultuous history of her people. These deftly crafted poems preserve moments from the past with the uncompromising precision of a camera's shutter, making Borrowed Light a particularly strong debut collection"
