The Burning Bush: Poems and Other Writings (1940-1980)

The Burning Bush: Poems and Other Writings (1940-1980)
by Aaron Kramer, Cornwall Books, 1982

This collection by the American academic, translator and poet, Aaron Kramer, The Burning Bush, represents, as his long-time friend and publisher Thomas Yoseloff tells us in his introduction, a "highly subjective" group of poems, "to represent the essence of his forty years of literary output". And, as was the intent in this careful selection, the reader does "come away with a thorough understanding of the essence of the poet's oeuvre".

An understanding, moreover, which leads one to marvel at the sensitivity of Dr. Kramer's perceptions, his intense and burning interest in all which surrounds him, his ability to evoke, through a careful selection of impressions - Everyman. And yet, although he too is Everyman through his detailing of a life - his life - he is yet unique, not only in the way that we all are as distinct personalities shaped by genetic endowment and environment - but this is a scintillating soul which compels us, after reading one group of poems, to go on reading, discovering, and admiring the essence of this person whose legacy to the world is this special creative talent.

The Burning Bush is both reality and metaphor. Dr. Kramer's cultural/historical roots shape his sensitivities and his ability to discern, to cull the precious element from what might appear to be the pedestrian; dross of anyone's existence in a way that celebrates life, in a manner that, in the true creative mind, sings of the glory of life. He is aware of the dark side of life, of human nature, of history. Never forgetting that he still is able to gently move aside the curtain of despair, the cushion of apathy, and find that precious spark in every situation, in any person; surely we all have the potential to perceive, to appreciate as he does?

Many of these poems were published in his previous nine collections. these are poems of joy, of longing, of bitter regret, of fond memory and of despair too in the knowledge that time is such an inexorable and ineffable element; and too little of it is apportioned to each one of us. But there is also present in this collection humour and whimsy and a deep and abiding love. The love of a son for his father, his mother and later, as a motherless young boy, for the sister who would try to mother him.

In the segment titled Family: 1 - the poet speaks of a story his mother would tell him to encourage him to eat, as a child. In A Lunch Remembered, the mother croons a story: "Once, in a forest a mother bird/sang while her babies sat sleeping/Hushabye fledglings! At dawn you fly/over the deep wide waters./Alone I'll die,/but hushabye;/you'll live, sweet sons and daughters..." And the child then asks: "Did they live? The story's finished/Did she die? Eat up the spinach!/What's the matter. Ma? You're crying!"

So it's little wonder that the child grown to a man could write such poems as The Song of the Burning Bush. "It blazes wild, this bush of woe-/not water speaks to its need, nor wine;/only weeping and blood - there grow/such furious berries, that all who dine/go screaming and dreaming over the seas,/seeking an altar for their knees." And this man did, as he promised in that poem, "tear the testaments out of my soul". The poems are his testament. His avowal of a life realized, well lived.

In the group of poems included in The Holocaust selection he writes in The rising in the Warsaw Ghetto: "If a word from Warsaw came,/unsurprised we took the news;/April's sun had set aflame/fifty thousand ashlike Jews". Briefly holding aloft the flame of life, those ashlike Jews affirmed their right and although might briefly triumphed leaving them in a funeral pyre of immense proportions, their actions, their affirmation still lives through the burning lines of a poet.

In the poem Tour, he tells us:
In four languages, the guide
explains as she has twice a day for years,
that we are entering
one of the quaintest sections of the city,
formerly the Jewish quarter.
Inside the synagogue she points out oddities.
'Notice the walls!'
Perfectly arrayed, as if being marched
are names -
seventy thousand Czechoslovak Jews,
their dates of birth and deportation.

"A touch on the shoulder/'Must you always be the last one/back on the bus?" he is asked, when he feels immersed in the memory of his immense black experience which he feels in his very marrow, as though it had happened to him; a brother Jew, knowing it had happened to him, and will continue to be a part of a Jew's experience, his life.

This man, this poet, this son, father, lover, husband, considers himself a fortunate man. Fortunate in the love lavished upon him by a father and mother who cherished their children; fortunate in his memories of them, in his memories of his own children growing up, thriving, in his companionship with his wife. He calls himself, in poems, Mr. Lucky, Mr. Glucklich. In the poem Mr. Glucklich Takes a Shower, we are given an instant history of the fondness of the human memory, as, under the shower which becomes "a world that has only water":

He is thirty-four, circling Lake Garde,
guzzling in his thirst its Giorno blue;
he is twenty-four, wheeling his baby
up to the fountain in Washington Square;
he is fourteen, repaying spray with madrigals
the length of Gravesend Bay;
he is four, above the shadowy Hudson,
on a mountainside across from Newburgh,
joining his mouth to the nipple of a spring;
he is the first breather ever cradled by the sea;
he is the sea god.

Dr. Kramer writes a universal experience, in an exquisite language of understanding. Hindsight is something we are all gifted with, but more, so many of us have experiences which, although we perceive them as being unique to ourselves are but repetitions of limitless human experience; they repeat themselves generation after generation. In Hindsight we are thusly informed:

You kept us safe, you kept us soft,
you trembled when we sneezed or coughed;
you gave your life for our life's sake -
no doubt it was a grave mistake:
but it was a mistake of love
which we are also guilty of.
Our children also figure out
what we are whispering about.
To keep them soft, we too grow hard;
to keep them safe, we too are scarred.
And through our love for them, we see
your love's true shape and quality.

To have been able to read this collection represents an experience of recognition. There is a sublime beauty in the strength of so many of these poems. No man could wish a finer epitaph to leave as a reminder of his own life and experience, and the richness of both. To evoke in the reader the sense of kinship, of empathetic recollection is no mean feat.

Some poems, such as those comprising the first half of Minotaur, although certainly not lacking in conviction, do not, however, quite manage to persuade this reader; there's almost a lack of intensity of experience itself ... a perception which is lifted in the second half of Minotaur when one no longer feels a distanced onlooker, but is once more taken by the poet into the inner circle of experience.

This is a diversified group of poems, to which the reader can only respond with a sense approaching love for a stranger, the writer of these poems, who happens in the end to be no stranger at all.