LONGING

Feld’s luminous poems explore a range of topics, including grief, abuse, friendship, and Jewish faith.

The works in this autobiographical collection range across decades. Some deal with the poet’s childhood terror when her frequently unemployed father beat her elder brother with a belt; others deal with assaults she suffered in confused silence at the hands of a neighborhood grocer and an older boy in her apartment building. A series of plangent pieces recount the family’s vigil at her mother Lillian’s deathbed when the author was a newlywed, and harrowing works revisit a miscarriage and the agonizing birth of her daughter. There are brighter pieces on her marriage to her rabbi husband, Eddie, which re-create the “first time we made Shabbos together” and ordinary arguments over chores. Several poems recall her work as a peace activist and as a writing teacher helping rabbinical students express themselves. A few lyrical works elegize loved ones; others celebrate landscapes and communities, including the Illinois prairie and her current home in Northampton, Massachusetts, where neighbors rallied to help each other in a snowstorm. Feld’s collection features poems of gripping immediacy, but they add up to a reflective, holistic view of a woman’s life in which one sees beginnings shape a future and pain build compassion and strength. She writes in a free, conversational language that suits her confessional tone, but it’s full of realistic, evocative imagery, whether registering the unbearable fear of an abused child in “My brother and I each separately” (“I am not in the bedroom /…when my father / says, Pull down your pants, when / my brother pleads, No. Why? No. / What have I done? No. Please”) or a small, subtle kindness in “The straw, day one” (“Delicately, / knowingly, she dipped the straw into the cup, / closed her finger over the top to create a vacuum, / then slowly released a few drops at a time / with the straw to my mother’s lips, / to moisten them, to provide / relief”).

A fine collection that brings secret travails to life with passionate intensity.