New & Selected Poems (with DVD) (Book & DVD) [Paperback]

A concise review for a concise poet:

Perfect -
In every way -
perfect

There is something fantastic in the way he "can compress an attitude to life that has an immense history into three lines with language intense and clear as diamonds" He can "convey much meaning in few words, and exhibit the sentiment with more weight than bulk". A complete master.

Here is a poem, called Bearings, from this miraculous book:

Now I hear nearby
That dog I heard last night
Barking at a distance
I have walked far enough
In the darkness to know -
Sometimes I ran -
How far I can go
To get where I am

Those last two lines might almost be a motto for these poems.
Each year I make literary discoveries, more often than not novelists, so to come across a fine poet of whom I had never heard before is not only a cause for joy, but an unexpected surprise. To discover a poet with such an utterly individual voice and fresh, lucent style, is something to celebrate.
Samuel Menashe (happily still with us at 86) is a New Yorker, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, and has lived in his home town most of his life, in the same small apartment. On the accompanying DVD - which makes this book even more of a precious bargain - the nobly handsome, elderly yet sprightly poet talks a little (though, frustratingly, not all that much) about his life, and recites from memory many of the poems collected in this treasurable anthology. His memory must be a keen one, as, with pleasure akin to a father`s love for his children, he gives articulate voice to these brief, succinct poems, speaking them as if they are a part of his own being, pebbles collected on the long rolling sands of his long life.
It is tempting to compare many of the poems here - almost all very short, some only a couple of lines - to haiku, and indeed some of them do resemble those profound, resonant `moments in time`. But they are not haiku, however deeply felt and finely honed as they most certainly are. And that`s the thing one realises after reading these poems; they have, over years, been revised, pondered over, sculpted, sharpened until not a word is superfluous or missing. All poets worth the name do this, but few say so much in such a scant number of words.
These deceptively small poems are like Blake`s `world in a grain of sand`. They are both intensely personal and entirely universal. There is little that is esoteric or exclusive. Words are given their due here as fully as in any poem by, say, Auden or Larkin, but Menashe is always content to say what needs to be said, then to get out! The reader is never pandered to, but never forgotten.
Another example, a poem called In Stride:

Streets at night like decks
With spars overhead
Whose rigging ropes
Stars into scope

This is like a deft painting, where we see much but even more is implicit, left for the reader-viewers to imagine and see for themselves.
Menashe`s art is a playful one, too. His puckish quality reminds me a little of ee cummings (though not in style) and is a delightful aspect of his poetry.

A flock of little boats
Tethered to the shore
Drifts in still water
Prows dip, nibbling

Or this, called Beachhead:

The tide ebbs
From a helmet
Wet sand embeds

You`ll have noticed he uses as little punctuation as possible. He never needs to. This really is poetry pared down, though somehow it never feels miserly. Far from it. Here are riches galore.
It is also worth noting that Menashe, as his name implies, is a Jewish poet, and a deeply religious one, not in any dogmatic or blatant way, but rather in a way that sees the spiritual in the earthly, the cosmic in the mundane.
I hope this wonderful poet achieves many more readers since the publication, two
years ago, of this long-overdue collection. For me, as I hope for all poetry lovers,
this too-well-kept secret will be a discovery to be cherished. These poems are so short one can even, like their author, memorise some of them without too much effort. So could children...
A book to live with and love.

Reeds Rise from Water

rippling under my eyes
Bulrushes tuft the shore

At every instant I expect
what is hidden everywhere

a surprise and a joy for its brevity and clarity of voice - reaches places other more verbose poetry falls short of.