O the Chimneys: Selected Poems, Including the Verse Play, Eli by Nelly Sachs

O the Chimneys: Selected Poems, Including the Verse Play, Eli Reviews

• 
  Sidharth Vardhan

  "The old couple
  sitting hand in hand
  twin constellation
  still glowing with the burnt music
  of their past
  when they died as they loved bewitched
  by the magic of a black prince
  this excised silhouette of night
  like insomnia mourning on the retina
  while their future in cuticles and hair
  outgrows their death-"
• 
  Jazzy Lemon

  Through these writings, the voices of the six million cry out and will never be silenced.
• 
  Steven Godin

  
  When sleep leaves the body like smoke
  and man, sated with secrets,
  drives the overworked nag of quarrel
  out of its stall,
  then the fire-breathing union begins anew
  and death wakens in every bud of May
  and the child kisses a stone
  in the eclipse of the stars.
  
  - - -
  
  Further
  further
  through the smoking image
  of burnt-down miles of love
  on to the sea
  that growls and bites
  the ring of its horizon into pieces—
  
  Further
  further
  on to the team of black horses,
  with the head of the sun in the wagon,
  which climbs white walls
  through the barbed wire of time
  sinking sprinkled with blood
  into the prisoner's eye—
  until he finally
  further
  further
  a brother of sleep
  runs out into the great freedom—
  
  Already the dream has caught him
  in the star-locked circle . . .
  
  - - -
  
  The night was a coffin of black fire
  the red amen-colors of prayers
  interred themselves inside it
  
  In this purple were rooted teeth —hair—and the body
  a shaken tree in the ghostly wind
  Lightfaced—this one day cherub
  ignited itself
  The flames in the mesh of veins
  all rushed toward their significance
  
  Music played in the resurrection ashes
  
  
  
• 
  Old Man and the Read

  The first third of the book was extraordinarily powerful with poems about the holocaust. It's amazing how effectively poetry can express the horror of events like this so much more than prose can. For example the following are just a few lines from her title poem about the furnaces that incinerated the bodies:
  "O the chimneys
  On the ingeniously devised habitation of death
  When Isreal's body drifted as smoke
  Through the air"
  
  The rest of the book is quite good, also, but didn't have the emotional impact that this first section had.
• 
  Dave Schaafsma

  Nelly Sachs was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966. She is known for her poetry about the Holocaust, the experience of which dramatically changed her style and approach to poetry. She is also known for her close relationship to Paul Celan, a Holocaust survivor, a friendship that almost exclusively took place through an exchange of letters. It is in part for this reason I read the book, which is roughly half of her collected works, though I had read some of her work decades ago, and was reminded of her through Anne Michael's new book of poetry, Correspondences, which quotes her and features a portrait of her. I didn't read the verse play, Eli, but I read the poetry, focusing especially on what seemed to me the greatest work, In the Habitations of Death, And No One Knows How to Go On, and Glowing Enigmas, the latter translated by the great Michael Hamburger. I think in part because of Hamburger's vibrant translations, I found the Enigmas her best work, but it was really all powerful and impressive. Amazing how little we hear of her today, a chronicler of rage and trauma and grief, like Anna Akhmatova.
• 
  Imen Benyoub

  O the homeless colors of the evening sky!
  
  O the homeless colors of the evening sky !
  O the blossoms of death in the clouds
  like the pale dying of the newly born !
  
  O the riddles that the swallows
  ask the mysterythe
  inhuman cry of the gulls
  from the day of creation
  
  Whence we survivors of the stars' darkening?
  Whence we with the l ight above our heads
  whose shadow death paints on us?
  
  Time roars with our longing for home
  like a seashell
  
  and the fire in the depths of the earth
  already knows of our ruin
  
• 
  Andrew

  sachs' work is simultaneously gorgeous and unsettling...this is probably one of my favorite books!
• 
  Sunrise

  Nelly Sachs is a modernist poet and her main subject is the Holocaust. The variety of modernism she's working with is the kind inflected by Symbolism and Surrealism---a string of images that can't easily be made to make sense, but say something to our unconscious mind (if we have such a thing).
  
  Although the Holocaust enters into every part of this collection, it is most front-and-centre in the poems drawn from her first book, In the Habitations of Death. I was surprised how many poems she could write that address the Holocaust so directly---even Paul Celan only wrote a handful of poems that attempt that. I don't need to say that they're excruciating poems, but they attain a sense of fullness and appropriateness too. I won't quote the first poem, "O the Chimneys," which lends its title to the collection, since I assume others have typed it out here. I want to type out a less prominent poem from the first book which nevertheless really sticks with me.
  
  

  Chorus of the Stars
  
  We stars, we stars
  We wandering, glistening, singing dust---
  Earth, our sister, has gone blind
  Among the constellations of heaven---
  A scream she has become
  Among the singers---
  She, richest in longing
  Who began her task---to form angels---in dust,
  She whose secret contains bliss
  Like streams bearing gold---
  Poured out into the night she lies
  Like wine in the streets---
  Evil's yellow sulphur lights flicker over her body.
  
  O earth, earth
  Star of stars
  Veined by the spoors of homesickness
  Begun by God Himself---
  Have you no one who remembers your youth?
  No one who will surrender himself as the swimmer
  To the oceans of death?
  Has no one's longing ripened
  So it will rise like the angelically flying seed
  Of the dandelion blossom?
  
  Earth, earth, have you gone blind
  Before the sister eyes of the Pleiades
  Or Libra's examining gaze?
  
  Murder hands gave Israel a mirror
  In which it recognized its death while dying---
  
  Earth, O earth
  Star of stars
  One day a constellation will be called mirror.
  Then, I blind one, you will see again!
  

  
  Following this first book, I thought the next two books show a decline in quality. They are just less focused. It's a risk with this kind of poetry that, if the images don't cohere in some powerful way, they are just going to slip away from each other. Thematically, these poems no longer directly address the Holocaust, but are still clearly haunted by it and by death.
  
  I thought that things picked up again starting with Flight and Metamorphosis. From here until the end of the book, the poetry attains a mysterious numinousness that is probably connected with her religious experience. The consciousness of death remains an important topic too, but it seems that rather than depict the Holocaust as a breach of the order of existence (as in the previously quoted poem), she tries to embed it in a religious view of life in which there can never really be any breach. Well, that's just my surmise based on my reading.
  
  Here is an example from the book, Journey into a Dustless Realm:
  
  

  Whoever
  
  Whoever
  leaves the earth
  to touch the moon
  or
  other heavenly minerals that bloom---
  wounded
  by remembrance
  will he leap up
  with the exploding stuff of yearning,
  for
  from painted terrestrial night
  his prayers have winged up
  out of the daily annihilations
  to search for the inwards streets of the eyes.
  
  Craters and parched seas
  drenched with tears
  journeying through starry stations
  on their way to a dustless realm.
  
  Everywhere the earth
  is building its homesickness colonies.
  Not to land
  on the oceans of lustful blood
  only to sway
  in the light-music of ebb and flood
  only to sway
  in the rhythm of the unwounded
  sign of eternity:
  Life---Death---
  

  
  
  The final sequence in the book is the "Glowing Enigmas." I really loved this long sequence. I'll just end by quoting a couple stanzas:
  
  

  Here we wind a wreath
  Some have violets of thunder
  I have only a blade of grass
  full of the silent language
  that makes this air flash--- (from page 249)
  
  The blood's circulation
  weeps toward
  its spiritual sea
  there
  where the blue flame
  of agony
  bursts through night
  
  
  
  Lilies on the equator of anguish
  When with your hands
  you pronounced the blessing
  distances contracted
  those akin to the sea
  drifted toward the beyond
  and dust without memory began to flow---
  
  When your jaw dropped
  with the weight of earth--- (from page 287)
  

  
  Just a last word on the translation. I think all of the translations are fantastic. There are four different translators, but I always felt I was hearing Sachs, not her translators.
• 
  Dolf van der Haven

  die Liebe ist eine Sandpflanze
  die im Feuer dient
  und nicht verzehrt wird
  
  (Love is a plant growing in sand
  that serves in fire
  and is not consumed)
  
  Nobel Prize in Literature 1966.
  
  Nelly Sachs' poetry is about terror and the German language is the right medium to express it in. This edition is bilingual, so I could skip to the English translation where necessary to understand the more complex German words. The translations themselves are not as good as the original poems, so read it in German if you can. Initially mostly about the Holocaust, with frequent use of "smoke", "ashes", "orphans" and similar words, the later poetry gradually, carefully, moves to a more positive worldview where love becomes central. It does revolve very much around similar subjects and expressions, though. Impressive poetry that needs to be read in multiple sessions to avoid getting overcome by depression.
• 
  Peter Talbot

  Fascinating "mystery play" and existential poetry of the holocaust written in German (this a better translation) by the Nobel Prize winning poet Leonie Sachs (b Berlin, escaped on the last flight to Stockholm, wrote as a Swedish citizen). Well known in Sweden, Germany and Israel, deserves to be more widely read here in the USA. Until I read "Eli" I was convinced that the holocaust could never be treated justly in art, but only in historical witness. This stunning work has at the very least made me less secure on that point. Must read.
  
  
• 
  Liane

  The poetry is this volume is written in German on one side and English on the other side. I don’t speak German and I think that translated poetry in particular is a challenging art.
  
  Unsurprisingly, the poetry is as sad as can be expected. I much prefer prose, but that is no author’s fault, surely it’s in my own understanding. The play, Eli, at the end of the book was interesting; The post script at the end described that Nelly Sachs had written the play shortly after her flight to Sweden.
• 
  Dara

  The poetry is all about the Holocaust and while I read sections it just was unrelenting and similar. She’s a Nobel laureate so I can see the quality of work but I just couldn’t engage. And it the language didn’t hook me.
• 
  Michael Pennington

  A poor translation, unfortunately.
• 
  Braeden

  Some real beautiful poems in here.
• 
  Valerie

  Poetry is like salsa, I guess. Everyone has their own perferred recipe, and the "right" spot on the continuums of smooth/chunky, spicy/mild, sweet/sour, etc is strictly a matter of taste. My husband absolutely gushes over poetry that leaves me scratching my head, and he reacts likewise to poetry that moves me.
  
  This poetry was right up my alley in terms of how Sachs strings words together. (Read in translation, I will admit.) As far as the tone: The tone of the particular poems in the collection I read were very unusual in that they vividly paint the unbearable sorrow and grief of Sachs's Holocaust experience with little to none of the usual horror and dread that usually accompanies other accounts. The verse play Eli carries the same melancholy tone and themes.
• 
  Sarah

  I really enjoyed the first section of poems, starting with "O the Chimneys". The rest of the poems are more abstract and seem to have no "correct" interpretation, instead aiming to convey interrelated themes. I lost interest in these & skimmed over most of them. I did enjoy the final section of the book, the play "Eli".