Book-of-the-Week

Book of the Week: as far as I can

 

 

Our Book of the Week is as far as I can, by Dietmar Tauchner, published by Red Moon Press in 2010. Tauchner is editor-in-chief of Chrysanthemum, the fine, German/English haiku journal, and a fine haiku poet in both languages. In this collection, Dietmar attempts to come to terms in haiku with what is undoubtedly the darkest stain on his country’s recent history, the memories of Nazi domination and of the Mauthausen concentration camp. It is a compassionate volume, one in which the poet goes “as far as (he) can” to find love and redemption for himself and his generation by taking on himself a simulacrum of Jewish pain, guilt, mockery and humiliation, and symbolically climbing the infamous Mauthausen stairs.

 

gas chamber
a man lifts up
his child

fading photograph
great grandpa’s eyes invisible
under the hat’s brim

deep inside you no more war

 

You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library.

Do you have a chapbook published 2010 or earlier you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details.

Haiku featured in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by THF Digital Librarian Garry Eaton, and are used with permission

This Post Has 5 Comments

  1. Pleased to have followed a path following the posting in Revirals 88 of Dietmar’s “gas chamber” senryu
    A superb collection.
    Thank you Danny Blackwell for selecting the poem.

  4. Genocide is one of the most important themes of all and Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’ reminds us that any one of us – even a poet such as the ‘gentle’ Edmund Spenser – can nurse genocidal thoughts in our hearts.

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