"Words on Poetry," reviews of poets by Miriam Sagan from the Santa Fe New Mexican.
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Shirley Kaufman, Threshold

Shirley Kaufman is a poet of paradoxes, and the effort to reconcile them. As an American poet who is a long time resident of Israel, she has a kind of double vision. In addition, she writes the subjects of lyric poetry--from relationship to a love of place--in highly contemporary form. And her poetry holds up a vision of peace and reconciliation, while never minimizing the tension in either the family or larger political sphere.

Her newest book, Threshold (Copper Canyon, 2003) hinges in part on the different concepts enclosed in its title. A threshold is something to be crossed, but it also suggests containment. Kaufman explains:

“I like the word "threshold" because of its Old English agricultural origin and also its multiple uses and meanings. I simply woke up one morning with the word in my mouth, and started from there. The "Threshold" sequence, which defines my new book by the same title, began as notes from a journal of the millennial year. All that hype about the year 2000 made us feel that something important was about to begin. But I've explored the events and feelings recorded here before. The continuity of image and return to familiar places - Seattle where I grew up and San Francisco where I raised my three daughters - happen in real time every year, as well as in memory.”

And so the the book opens with a prologue poem:

You have to begin
with the word itself
first
tread of oxen

The look of Kaufman’s poems is variable on the page. Some are written in conventional form, with the margin flush left. Many scatter around the page, using numerous margins and indentations for what is currently called an “open field” effect. The use of this kind of white space in a poem, however, is older than any current trend, and goes back to many of the poets of the Fifties and Sixties who were anthologized as “Naked Poetry.” The effect in Kaufman’s work is spacious but controlled. She points to “Sanctum,” the last poem in the book, as a kind of touchstone for its themes. It begins with a work of art that is simultaneously beautiful and ominous:

On top of a hill near the Lebanese border,
Micha Ullman dug a grave, then cut through
the rocky outcrop and sculpted a throne.
As if he’d uncovered its archetypical shape
out of pure limestone.

The poem then leaps into personal history with the wry observation:

....It was ’73. Right after the war.
we lived on a cul-de-sac called Neve Sha’anan.
Place of tranquillity. That too was conceptual art.

She adds--“There is another poem in this book that feels like a kind of touchstone for me: "The Emperor of China." Here also there's a line that matters a lot to me: "What lasts is what we are up against." I'm grateful for lines like that when they come.”

Kaufman is a long established poet, with many books, including translations, to her credit. But a lifetime in the craft doesn’t necessarily mean all creative problems are solved.

She says of her poetic process: “My aim, with every book, is to write poetry that matters to others as well as to me. I want my poems to reflect real, deeply felt experience, but also to be more receptive to the unknown, the invisible. To changes in the world and in me. I'm rarely satisfied. Perhaps that's why most of us go on writing. I don't ask any more how or why I write poems. I know they begin from somewhere or something I'm not always aware of at the start. I love the sense of discovery as I write, as the associative process takes over. In the end, I'm always at the threshold. The older I get, the more I want to know. I think I'm looking for some kind of radiance. A glimmer of it. In life. Not after.”

For as both the poem “Sanctum” and the book itself ends:

Let’s sit here together on the throne
as if suspended over our own deaths.
Let’s lean back--easy--against the supporting stone,
and trust it to bear our weight
a little longer.

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