CITY LIGHTS BOOKSTORE (NO, NOT IN SAN FRANCISCO!

I'll make no bones about it, I love City Lights Bookstore in Sylva. I like just being there, wandering around, talking with my friends who work there, especially Joyce Moore, whom I've known since grad. school days. City Lights has a full schedule of readings/signings, bless them.

To day I want to feature an evening with a friend of mine, Judith Harway, whose book All That Is Left, has just been published by Turning Point Press. Judith has poetic ties to the state by way of her friendship with me, Susan Lefler, and Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin. Susan and Jeannette have had their poetry featured on our ncarts.org site in the past. The four of us came together through the Hambdige Center for the Creative Arts in Rabun Gap, Georgia. Judith and I worked as workshop leaders there for two summers, with Susan in attendance. Susan in turn pulled Jeannette into our circle of friends, and we have stayed in touch ever since.



(Jeannette, Susan, Judith, and me)


Near the end of May Judith read from her new book at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva. We all gathered for the occasion; the reading was mesmerizing and the discussion wide-ranging.



(Judith talks with a young woman who is taking her degree in Education and hopes to teach her students the love of poetry.



(Judith, before the reading)



(Two future teachers!)





(Mother and daughter poets!)

About Judith's book:

The haunting story of flight and arrival in Judith Harway's All That Is Left reminds us of the dire, even deadly, choices that history can thrust upon innocent people: "A journey starts/when it is time to go." Harway's poems trace, in memorable terms, the impact of large historical currents on the lives of individuals.

Testimonials for All That Is Left:


“All families, as Judith Harway knows, are haunted. We’re haunted by the ghosts of ancestors who, in turn, are dreaming of us, their descendants. In this elegiac suite of poems, Harway captures the delicate threads that bind these two worlds, lost to each other. It’s a stunning work that will pierce your heart.”—Joseph Skibell

“Judith Harway’s ALL THAT IS LEFT gathers a family’s history into poetry, right down to the least detail—the scrap of cabbage left in the soup pot, the almost fleeting imprint of a night’s waking dream, the various misunderstandings and connections that can haunt or nourish for a lifetime. Throughout this book, the longing for what Barry Lopez calls the ‘spine of narrative’ holds the poetry true to what it means to be an inhabitant of a particular place where one’s connections to history tangle and transform. Family, the inner and outer journeys of its members, and the expectations and responsibilities it places upon those members, remains a living source in these poems. Through them what is left is the human story. The ongoing song of survival.”—Kathryn Stripling Byer

“‘We die as many times as we close our eyes on memory’ reads an epigraph in Judith Harway’s wonderful new book All That is Left, and I’m grateful Harway does not close her eyes on memory. In these richly detailed and languaged poems of family and memory, history provides setting, imagery, gossip, terrors, and music... In one of the ‘Last Words’ poems, the grandfather says, ‘What the Torah asks of us is that we mouth each word as if our lives hang on it.’ Judith Harway’s poems do just that.”—Susan Firer

“Judith Harway’s All That Is Left is a mystic seance with poetry as medium bringing back the spirits of her Jewish lineage and those murdered in the Holocaust, honoring and incarnating them in her own being—the lives they lived, the love they felt—and in the process coming to terms with her Jewish identity. Her book shines like a Shabbat candle between the dark of history and an uncertain future.”—Antler

About Judith:

Judith Harway’s poetry has appeared in dozens of literary journals, as well as in The Memory Box, a chapbook published by Zarigueya Press in 2002. Her work has earned fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board, the Hambidge Center and the MacDowell Colony. She is on the faculty of the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

ISBN 978-1934999523, 104 pages, $18.00

Judith's book may be found at Barnes & Noble, Powell's, and Amazon online.




POEMS FROM THE COLLECTION

Before the Pogrom


Early spring.
A dark room lit
by candles. Children
on the floor before
a smoky hearth,
toes of their shoes
cut off for growing.
Smells of soup
and cabbage,
damp socks hung
to dry. Straw mattresses
piled high with winter
quilts. Outside, a shawl
of rain drawn over
evening’s face. Flocks
of goats lie huddled
on the leaky sod
of rooftops, handcarts
turning home
down muddy lanes.
A gathering of relatives
who stare into
the slow shutter of history,
afraid to move.

At Pesach
the Haggadah tells us
of a time of bondage,
of the flight
of the Israelites from Egypt
into the wilderness
of freedom. Plagues
rained on the land.
The hand of the Almighty
smote even babies
dead. This is the way
I understand the day
my grandmother’s family
left Meskaporichi:
there never was a choice:
A journey starts
when it is time to go.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Free ...
—Solomon, sailing into New York Harbor

as, to court the obvious, a bird
one of the raucous swirl
diving for offal in the steamship’s wake

as young men doff their hats and crush
against the rail, stunned by the engines’
lurch towards silence, a dull humming

after nineteen days of roar; or free
as sunlight, pale and hesitant, an aura
petaling the Statue on her island,

bigger than imagining. A free ride
yours, across the North Atlantic
hiding first in folds of darkness

down below then slowly learning
that a man can be so quiet
no one notices the absence of his name

upon the manifest. Free as the bread
of strangers, weevily potatoes; free
as tears, as prayers that praise God freely

though you ask him nothing.
“Land of the Free,” a crust of island
rises to meet the ship like certainty

you’ve nothing left to lose, you’re free
to take your chances, for good or ill, in this
the only world I’ve ever known.



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Tending the Past— for Chaie

Wrap your feet in rags. Come stravaging
home down a lane between potato fields
as daylight waters down to dusk
and hearthstones stir with fire. Take off


your shawl. Bend to your stitchery
by candlelight, pretending not to laugh
at your brothers singing Etel Betel’s tochter
und Chaim Yankel’s zohn. Unpin your hair

and brush it to your waist at bedtime.
It is better not remembering
some names, some times: just drop them
like a glove, their loss unnoted

in the mystery of how this world rolls
over us. Rolled in the same old quilt
wake up a million miles away
from Meskaporichi. Though home

is all you see, even with closed eyes,
bend to your stitchery until the whistle sounds
then shuffle out into grey streets
where lamps already glow. Walk slowly

in your flowered shawl and listen
past the cartwheels’ clatter, shouts and horns,
the streetcars’ racket down the Bowery
for a voice as gentle as your father’s was

then take a man from home and love him well.
Take his name, although its syllables pile up
like fallen chimney stones. Brush out your hair
and sow the rugs of your apartment

with hairpins and tears. Wrap your son in songs
you carried from the shtetl, feeding him
on things kept to yourself
no one can make you tell.