Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust

Challenging Theodor Adorno’s famous statement that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, Beyond Lament is a rich and varied anthology consisting of new and previously published poems about the atrocity of the Holocaust. While writing poetry about the Holocaust may be considered by some to be a futile attempt to express the inexpressible, for many the need to give voice to the anger and despair of the Holocaust is as essential as the need to come to grips with its unspeakable horror. Editor Marguerite M. Striar has arranged the nearly 300 poems in this volume to tell the story beginmning with the early premonitions of Nazi evil in 1933, through the course of the unthinkable violence that ended in 1945 with Hitler’s demise, to the flourishing of concern for human rights in the aftermath of the Holocaust. These works by well-known poets such as Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Czeslaw Milosz, Dannie Abse, and Robert Pinsky, as well as many lesser-known or unknown poets, show how poetry makes history memorable, confirm the resiliance of the human spirit, and prove that even in the fact of great suffering, the flame of creation will not be extinguished.