Sloan-Kettering: Poems
Kovner, an Israeli writer and resistance fighter, led the famous Vilna ghetto uprising in Lithuania during the Second World War; in these plainspoken poems he writes about his hospitalization for cancer, which killed him in 1987. Weaving together memories of fighting in the Baltic forests and the chronicle of a rapidly weakening body (at a certain point his vocal cords are cut out), Kovner meditates on the possibility of heroism in the face of illness. "Remain what you were! / Remain what you were!" he writes, reminding himself, "Far worse / were the things you have already seen, / by God!" Kovner's physical muteness makes the book's imperative to witness all the more moving; in the face of his ultimate silence, he strenuously refuses self-pity, choosing instead to show us how "you could take explicit note / of the wail rising from the pine trees / from branches weighed down / with so much snow."Copyright © 2005The New Yorker