Conversations with survivors

the long version

In this collection, Jacqueline Osherow integrates a poetry of historical and political reality - especially that of World War II - with a traditional, formal poetry of personal lyricism. Relating and rendering anecdotes told to her by Holocaust survivors, Osherow uses lyricism to approach the historically unknowable, to acknowledge the interrelationship of personal existence and history. "The events of World War II have begun to appear often in my work," Osherow says, "but not because I hope in any way to say anything about them themselves or in any way to convey their horror. For my generation - those born in the aftermath of the war - the horror is a fact of life. Indeed, it defined the world to us. It is as a testament to this predicament that I wish these poems to stand.". The title poem in Conversations with Survivors won the 1992 John Masefield Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. In the award's citation, Stanley Plumly praised the narrative poem's "quietly powerful yet ironic voice," the ability of its speaker "to make...the implicit world of the death camps part of the larger explicit world of all survivors."