True as Moonlight (Guernica Editions, 2014)
- Year: 2014
-
Buy/Read Online:
- Synopsis: Anticipation and awareness bud at the start of a new life and bloom with the wondrous changes that ensure. These lyrical narrative poems rejoice at the insights, emotions, and development of a newborn and her family over a brief period of years. Crafted with an artist's eye and poet's appreciation for the profound that nestles within the mundane, this collection shimmers with reverence and clarity. The trajectory of the poems shudders and shifts when the young girl's father falls ill. With unflinching honesty and compassion, Nudelman gently unwraps luminous, triumphant moments in life's circle of birth, growth, and mortality.
-
Testimonial(s)
“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.” − Laura Lush.
Ruminations
Come quickly to the street
where the bronze light burns
and gilds each lintel,
transmutes the window panes –
a sorcery of sight and skin
that piques dull inquiry.
Come quickly with me.
Inhale the divine that swoops
from nostril to blunted throat
then sneaks past guarded doors
into the hallway of your heart
where the lamplight grows.
Let it skip along the pathways
to the edges of your feet
until all of you blazes –
leaping, rejoicing, a flame
within the fire that encircles
the bands of this earth
and beyond the gravity-ropes
to time's embers.Recompense
There is the trickled revival of the juniper
behind a fence not yielding to the clouds
and the revival of the still fountain.
The revival of the cherry tree
after lightning slaps the trunk.
The repair of the stair that anger snapped,
of the rusted door, the fissures in it,
and the repair of the tangled yard.
There is a revival when we share broth at the table
when I hold your minute fingers to my cheek.
The revival from your eyes' blue light
when you breathe on my heart.
And there is the revival from the other days
which you have cleared with your voice
that unfolded from the storm's rough cloth
like angel-wings loosening the stones in my throat.
The revival when you entered this life
and the greater revival now.