Highly Commended, IP Picks Best Poetry, 2010
This collection travels well, from the author’s engagement with science as a medical practitioner to her appreciation and penetration of the Holocaust, to the issues facing contemporary Jews and the State of Israel and her experiences as a migrant to Australia.
It is a poetry of risk but also one of transcendance over the challenges facing people in an increasingly dangerous and unpoetic world.
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
A mix of historic and contemporary social commentary, this collection dares the reader to think about issues that matter. One of the judges commented: “I like the risks this author takes with language and the depth of social commentary. This is poetry with something to say. Unlike many poetry collections that live on the surface of things, here we can penetrate to the sub-text. Also good sense of the dramatic and use of closure.”
– IP Picks 2010 Judges’ Report
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
This is fluent, well crafted poetry but it is not always comfortable as Leah Kaminsky takes us on a journey with her father fleeing from Poland to escape the holocaust, then as a doctor struggling to keep her commitment to her patients, and finally to Haifa, raising children under constant danger from rockets and suicide bombers. It is deeply felt poetry, gaining its power from precision and understatement. It is poetry which recalls Carolyn Forché’s compelling anthology Against Forgetting.
– Ron Pretty
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
A fierce book, intense with craft. This doctor-poet can really stitch words together: tight, unadorned and razor sharp – tailored to fit brilliantly.
– Dr Robyn Rowland
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
These are poems ‘tattooed with the history of war’, of portraits and voices, of departures and returns. Kaminsky stitches through the fabric of life, patching it ‘together with love’ to write of what it means to be a mother, daughter, doctor, poet and émigré.
– Libby Hart