Searching for Home

Robert Pack

Description

Searching for Home, Pack’s splendid twenty-second collection of poems, written largely during his last year of life, centers on the search for meaning. At its heart are sequences of poems about three figures, each a seeker after some physical or conceptual home where uncertainties are overcome.

• ·       Charles Darwin circumnavigates the world and gleans the evidence for his theory of evolution but seems to sanction a godless world of randomness and struggle.
• ·       Escaping Nazis, Albert Einstein immigrates to America, where he fights for peace while unsuccessfully trying to prove his unified field theory.
• ·       Pogroms force the poet’s scholarly Uncle Phil from Russia to America, where he lives in reduced circumstances and longs to relocate to Israel.

Searching for meaning informs other deeply felt poems, likewise rendered in supple metrical language, as do themes of empathy, peace, humor, and the beauty of nature—pushbacks against disappointment, mortality, and the human propensity for cruelty and violence. It is a landscape dotted with remembered moments of joy and wonder: otters slide down a muddy slope, kids put on a hilarious version of The Odyssey, a dog teases a little boy. . . .  Searching for Home is both a vision of Pack’s own odyssey and his final testament to what matters.  

The Butterfly and the Sun

My Odyssey

Searching for Home

The River

Mind

Talking Turkey

Pain

Survival Sonnet

Self-Deception

Oy Vey

Who’s Listening?

Doggerel Sonnet

Rabbi Finkelstein’s Thank-You Prayer

Moses’s Vision of His God

Leaving for Mars

By the Sea on Yom Kippur

Feeding the Deer

Otters Bellyflopping

Taunting Reversed

At Last

À La Descartes

Glockenspiel

Playing My Self

Quintessence Of Darwin

     1. Darwin’s Testament

     2. Grieving for Annie

     3. Panegyric for Charles Darwin's Nose

     4. Darwin's Beetle

     5. Darwin’s Worms

Determining Einstein[

1.     Einstein’s Last Day

2.     Einstein’s Marriage

3.     Spaced Out on Time

4.     Einstein for the League of Nations

5.     Einstein on Peace

6.     Einstein and Free Will

7.     Lost and Found

8.     Einstein’s Pipe

9.     The Atom Bomb

10.  Einstein’s Last Try

11.  Der Alter’s Legacy

 

Acknowledgments

Sujets

• Jewish
• Themes
• Subjects
• Jews
• Israel
• Loss
• Judaism
• Darwin
• Poetry
• Grief
• Charles Darwin
• Death
• Nature
• Albert Einstein
• Sigmund Freud
• Bible

Informations

• Publié par: Slant Books
• Date de parution: 10 octobre 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781639821495
• Langue: English

Extrait