No Heaven

Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s voice has long been acknowledged as a major force in American poetry. In No Heaven, her eleventh collection, she takes a hint from John Lennon’s \u0022Imagine\u0022 to wrestle with the world as it is: \u0022no hell below us, / above us only sky.\u0022
It is a world of cities, including New York, London, Jerusalem, and Berlin, where the poet can celebrate pickup basketball, peace marches, and the energy of graffiti. It is also a world of families, generations coming and going, of love, love affairs, and friendship. Then it is a world full of art and music, of Rembrandt and Bonnard, Mozart and Brahms. Finally, it is a world haunted by violence and war.No Heaven rises to a climax with elegies for Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by an Israeli zealot, and for the poet’s mother, whose death is experienced in the context of a post-9/11 impulse to destroy that seems to seduce whole nations.
Yet Ostriker’s ultimate stance is to \u0022Try to praise the mutilated world,\u0022 as the poet Adam Zagajewski has counseled. At times lyric, at times satiric, Ostriker steadfastly pursuesin No Heaven her poetics of ardor, a passion for the here and now that has chastened and consoled her many devoted readers.