From Booklist
Feldman revels in the tumult of life. Born in Brooklyn on the brink of the Depression, he depicts Jewish New York with attentiveness, mischievous humor, and abiding affection. Possessed of an epic sensibility, he writes in the grand tradition of Milton and Shelley, albeit in a boldly vernacular and skeptical mode, a form necessary for his evocations of the Holocaust, especially those found in his powerful 1965 collection The Pripet Marshes. That is one of 10 robust collections well represented here and accompanied by new works. War and its rhetoric concern Feldman, especially in All of Us Here (1986), as he castigates our bombastic leaders, our half-baked fantasies, our fears, and our pursuit of distraction via our embrace of such figures as those cartoon familiars, Mickey and Donald. Elsewhere, Feldman banters with his fellow poets and considers Picasso and Bette Davis. But what drives all his lavish poems is his unerring sense of the interconnectivity of life, the continuity of human experience, and the revelatory power of language. Donna Seaman
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From the Inside Flap
Irving Feldman is a master chronicler of our collective experience and an overlooked treasure of American poetry. Feldman’s rich body of work exhibits his mastery of language from the biblical to the conversational, his Yiddish flair for the comic, his profound social insight and lucidity. He writes about everything from the Coney Island days of his childhood
and his bohemian years in postwar New York to the art of Picasso and George Segal, from the Holocaust to its aftermath—in narrative and dramatic poems and personal lyrics that are by turns ardent, witty, biting, ecstatic, and heartbreaking.

Long a favorite among his fellow poets (John Hollander has called his work “amazing in its moral intensity”), Feldman has remained true to the soul’s deepest callings:

I have questioned myself aloud
at night in a voice I did not
recognize, hurried and
disobedient, hardly brighter.
What have I kept? Nothing.
Not bread or the bread-word.
What have I offered? Rebel
in the kingdom, my gift
has wanted a grace.

This glorious gathering of poems displays Feldman’s entire career in all its variety and passion, and confirms his place among the great poets of our time.

About the Author
Irving Feldman was born in Brooklyn in 1928. He was educated at the City College of New York and at Columbia University. He has taught for many years and is currently Distinguished Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Feldman’s collections of poetry include Beautiful False Things; The Life and Letters; All of Us Here, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; New and Selected Poems; Leaping Clear and The Pripet Marshes, both National Book Award finalists; and Works and Days, winner of the Jewish Book Council’s Kovner Poetry Prize. Feldman has received awards and grants from many institutions, including the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. He lives in Buffalo, New York.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Irving Feldman's body of work exhibits his mastery of language from the biblical to the conversational, his Yiddish flair for the comic, his profound social insight and lucidity. He writes about everything from the Coney Island days of his childhood and his bohemian years in postwar New York to the art of Picasso and George Segal, from the Holocaust to its aftermath." The gathering of poems displays Feldman's entire career in all its variety and passion, and confirms his place among the great poets of our time.

AUTHOR DESCRIPTION