Memory’s Reservoir Poems

In her second volume of poetry, Detroit-based writer Deborah Hochberg opens the door to this collection with a nod to the writing process itself, illuminating a serene meditative and receptive moment when a writer quietly takes up a pen at dawn, observing as “the pen rambles along / trickling ink / pages fill,” and likening the activity of writing to the slow organic gestation of “Philodendron tendrils / Twining ringlets of foliage.” So begins the first of five sections, with the central three sections opening out to take the reader on an archetypal journey with two poem cycles honoring ancestors, and one poem cycle honoring Jewish resistance during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943. These poems speak to common experiences of the Jewish people in the 20th century such as immigration, loss of home, loss of family, the trauma of the Holocaust, and the founding of the state of Israel.

Surrounding the central sections, like bookends, the poems in the first and last sections range thematically, taking as their subjects nature (such as in the celebration of the carpenter bee), the seasons (“…winter circling in / wrapping creation / in a calcimine cloak / a bridal sheath / swathing the terrain…”), familial relationships, celebration of friendship, female creativity (as in the paean to 17th-century composer Chiara Margarita Cozzolani), myth, dreamscapes, and memory. Alternately tender, insightful, and fierce, and always alert to the music and rhythm of language, this volume is a complex, rich tapestry of considerable depth and beauty.