Poetry. David Wolinsky's early poems, here gathered for the first time, many decades after they were written, have an expressive power that emanates from the poet's struggle to articulate not just his own pain but that of humanity as a whole. In The Crane Is Flying, the book's title- poem, he writes: 'My children, unborn, cry out for food, / for music... I hear their voices swelling from the future; they labor / beneath an enormous sea." Almost all of the poems in this marvelous collection, not just those for the poet's dead sister, are elegiac; yet at the same time they reach into the future, and this is the 'labor' they perform. Innsbruck I Must Leave Thee, a poem I have treasured since I first read it many years ago, begins: 'If this melody or some old chanson lodge / in the brain, sail in canonical polyphony...'; and indeed, once read, these poems will lodge in the brain, never to be forgotten.--Henry Weinfield Poetry. David Wolinsky's early poems, here gathered for the first time, many decades after they were written, have an expressive power that emanates from the poet's struggle to articulate not just his own pain but that of humanity as a whole. In The Crane Is Flying, the book's title- poem, he writes: 'My children, unborn, cry out for food, / for music... I hear their voices swelling from the future; they labor / beneath an enormous sea. Almost all of the poems in this marvelous collection, not just those for the poet's dead sister, are elegiac; yet at the same time they reach into the future, and this is the 'labor' they perform. Innsbruck I Must Leave Thee, a poem I have treasured since I first read it many years ago, begins: 'If this melody or some old chanson lodge / in the brain, sail in canonical polyphony...'; and indeed, once read, these poems will lodge in the brain, never to be forgotten.--Henry Weinfield
