Winner of the 2016 Poetry Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature.

“Enjoyable, readable, fresh.” – The Jury

In 1968 Isaac Bashevis Singer was asked by The Paris Review what he thought about the future of the novel. He was optimistic. But he did concede that poetry was in trouble. He actually went so far as to say that in the twentieth century poetry “became bad.” In his view poetry became bad because poets stopped caring whether their work was interesting or even possible to be understood.

Catullus’s Soldiers, my first collection of poems, was released by Cormorant Books in 2015. You’ll have to judge for yourself, but with the poems in the collection I’ve tried my best to be understood at least and, wherever possible, interesting!

Here’s a sample poem from the collection:

 

AS MY FATHER LAY DYING

 

As my father lay dying,

shrinking before our eyes,

I could not believe how light he was,

how his strong limbs became tentative,

how much he resembled a bird.

 

About what was happening

he kept laughing and telling stories.

He hid his dumb amazement because

death had always been a given

and because he wanted the last word.

 

One of my recent poems, “Moving Through Rooms in the British Museum”, was just published by The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted to poems about works of art. You can read it here.