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.
Leah Kaminsky is a writer and physician living in Melbourne. She is a student in the MFA Fiction Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, USA. She was the Eleanor Dark Flagship Fellow for Fiction in 2007 and is currently a Creative Fellow at the State Library of Victoria. She is the author of several books, and is editor of an anthology of prominent physician-writers, The Pen and the Stethoscope (Scribe Publishing, 2010).
Stitching things together, 2007
I: Tracing the pattern
I stab the curved needle
into broken skin
pulling edges together
with blue, nylon sutures
II: Alterations
my father was a tailor
on Haufgass in Zhetl, 1931
running his thumb
over loose threads
after he set the pigeons free on May 1st
red ribbons tied to their legs
he sat in Lushinkes gaol for months
urine poured into his Communist nostrils
my grandfather shared a bottle
of vodka with the guard
and put his son on board the SS Moreton Bay
in 1938, before the storm began
we sacrifice everything for our children
father said as he sewed coats in Melbourne
looking down from the window onto Flinders Lane
at men loading mannequins into trucks
while Europe blazed and swallowed up
his youth, his love, his life
he basted coat sleeves
and pad-stitched lapels
III: Pressing the Seams
local anaesthetic wears off
the laceration begins to throb
the pain of the body
split open, returns
Dealing the cards
I: Mizinek*
Fifteen years after father limped down Flinders Lane
and mother drank bromide tea in Bergen Belsen
I was born, an accident of old age
Why bring children into such a world?
I was a good girl then
my parents’ little miracle
their heart and soul and hope
II: Wrestling ghosts
On Saturdays they played
Polish rummy
crammed around the kitchen table in Caulfield
with Gdale and Genia, Luba and Max
the women smoked Craven A’s
the men ate greasy herring on rye
sipping whisky before they dealt
kids would wrestle in the lounge room
evil Dr Schnitzelbaum body-slammed Lewin the Jew
and I was always referee – 1,2,3, you’re out!
ghosts cheered from the sidelines
hidden behind the cigarette haze
no one ever saw them, except me
I resurrected them from the dead
their faces locked away
behind mother’s eyes
and I fell into her world
wanting to be the air
that filled her every breath
III: Shock
In this house, in my room
where I dreamed for years
unspoken words piled up
father sat on the floor
playing Go Fish with me
his crooked leg stretched out
while electrodes forced the sun
of pre-war Poland back into mother’s brain
and she saw a carp swimming in the tub
her mother chopping off its head
mincing the flesh for gefilte fish
served with a slice of carrot for shabbat
did the volts burn the darkness in her
and force my faceless relatives to move on
searching for shelter in another’s haunted mind?
unspoken words piled up between us
silent, like murdered bodies
the what-we-should-have-saids
the if-onlys
* the youngest child (Yiddish)
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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