The Glazier's Country

by Kaplan, Janet

• ISBN13: 9780823223022
• ISBN10: 0823223027
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-10-29
• Publisher: Fordham University Press

Summary

The Glazier's Country is a book of history and ethics. The poems follow the life of a survivor of Eastern European pogroms, but the theme is larger: notions of victimhood as an identity, moral certitude, and the differences between justice and revenge are questioned and explored. The poems' formal qualities mirror the fractured lives of the people in them: seemingly disparate voices break in, words are scattered across the page. But the ultimate message of The Glazier's Country is an insistence that we can choose wholeness, "choose good / solo & each day / over faith / over clan or country / it is an art / & each day again."

Author Biography

Janet Kaplan's poems have appeared in many journals, including The Paris Review, American Letters & Commentary, the Denver Quarterly Review, Western Humanities Review, and on the Internet on Poetry Daily. áHer previous collection, The Groundnote, won the Alice James Books New England and New York Competition and was hailed by Richard Howard as possessing "a voice sustained in all extremes high and low." Kaplan lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vi
Material	1	(4)
RAIN
Rain	5	(12)
THE GLAZIER'S COUNTRY
Promised Land	17	(6)
Pale of Settlement	23	(2)
The Glazier's Soul	25	(3)
The Glazier's Daughter	28	(7)
Untitled (``exile / astronoit'')	35	(1)
They	36	(2)
Untitled (``December ... in the last'')	38	(1)
Eighteen Trees	39	(2)
On the Eve	41	(1)
The Great Purpose	42	(8)
Untitled (``Don't you see?``)	50	(1)
The Glazier's Night	51	(3)
Morning Service	54	(3)
The Window	57	(9)
On the ferry's upper deck	66	(3)
OR, TO BE
Identity	69	(1)
Or, To Be	70	(3)
Notes and Sources	73	(6)
Afterword	79	(1)
Biographical Note	80