IN THIS BOOK I HAVE SOUGHT to open a number of poems to scrutiny. My hope is that these poems will continue to reverberate and to do cultural work. As I stated in the introduction, other poems also deserve careful attention. The readings constitute an attempt, however humble, to bring some of these poems into wider circulation and to understand the cultural work with words that these poems perform, the work they did then and the work they can do now. By excavating what Susan Gubar has called “eccentric or trivial details from the calamity” one can hope — like the English- language poets she studies — to “counter not only cultural amnesia but also collective memories that lose their potency when they get recycled as packaged commodities” (146).

As Adorno made clear, literature about the Holocaust must contend with the inadequacy of language to confront or express the extreme, with the speechlessness produced by that historical trauma, and with the inhumanly euphemistic and bureaucratic distortions to which the Nazis subjected language, though the focus on language must not distract from the physical acts of atrocity committed by the Nazis. Carolyn Forché has claimed that “extremity … demands new forms and alters older modes of poetic thought” and that “it also breaks forms and creates new forms from these breaks” (42). Paul Celan, “the most important poet of the German language since 1945” (Emmerich 1999, 7), is perhaps exemplary in his acute awareness of the problems poetry faces after the Shoah.