Become a Member
Books

Review: Complete Poems by Jon Silkin and Portraits by Elaine Feinstein

British Jewish sensibility

May 8, 2015 12:21
Complete Poems By Jon Silkin (Jon Glover and Kathryn Jenner Editions), Carcanet, £29.95

By

Peter Lawson,

Peter Lawson

2 min read

Jon Silkin's death in 1997 marked a huge loss to poetry. Silkin was a substantial literary presence, from his first volume The Peaceable Kingdom (1954) to his posthumously published Making a Republic (2002). He was central in bringing his British Jewish forebear Isaac Rosenberg to the public's attention, particularly in his critical work, Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War (1972), and his brilliant introduction to the Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (1979).

Silkin wrote as a self-aware English Jew - penning such poems as Astringencies, A Prayer Cup and The Jews of England - while also practising a non-parochial universalism. In Israel in 1967 for a writers' symposium, Silkin explained: "My awareness of being a Jew has forced me, not into saying to myself, I will learn Hebrew and have bifocal judgments, but I will read omnivorously and form my consciousness from as many cultures, humanistically speaking, as possible. Thus, my Jewish self-awareness has forced me into humanism and into a cosmopolitanism, cautioned, as it were, by English and Jewish specifics." A useful definition for a confident, diasporic Jewishness.

Some of Silkin's poems appeared in the Jewish Chronicle in the 1980s and 1990s. Others were published in the Jewish Quarterly and European Judaism.

From the 1950s onwards, Silkin allied his vision of a fair and just republic with Judaism: "The animals in my poems go into the ark/ There are two scrolls on the doors as they go". He also produced subtle and sensitive work about the Shoah: "As if steel, but a silvery/ tar creeps upon Isaac/ in Abraham's hand./ Our Bible// is clasped in darkness. And for wine/ three inches of the blood/ of six million".