Blue Tattoo: Poems of the Holocaust

The poetry of Lyn Lifshin is spare in words but loaded with meaning. She does not use a lot of redundant, Latinate words, but still gets to the point, and beyond. In "Blue Tattoo" this is quite evident. Very often, Lifshin does away with punctuation, yet the line widths and breaks do the work instead, constructing a cleaner, more spare structure. The poems become monuments. And this book is, itself, a monument to the millions of lost souls who had suffered and perished in the Nazi Holocaust of World war II. In her genius with words and imagination, she brings to life, for a brief moment, many who have disappeared forever.

As a former inmate of a Stalinist death camp, I'm simply amazed at the ability of Lyn Lifshin to recapture the essense of how horrific it is to be in such a degrading existence. Although Ms. Lifshin has never been an inmate in a Nazi death camp, she seems to have somehow tapped into the essense of it with chilling effect, and had I not known that she had not actually experienced such an ordeal, I would have believed to the contrary. She is a true genius!

Lyn Lifshin's collection of poems, "Blue Tattoo" is one more example of the genius of her ability to get inside the minds of people beyond her own place and time. In "Blue Tattoo" it is hard to believe that she has not actually experienced life in a Nazi death camp. In other books, she has demostrated this ability repeatedly; she has projected her imagination into the lives of prehistoric Native Americans, colonial New Englanders, and into the glitzy celebrity worlds of Madonna, Jackie O, to mention a couple. Lifshin is a true marvel!

Lyn's Holocaust poems give me the chilling perception that I've actually experienced life in a Nazi concenrtation camp. When I first read this book, I had the delusion that I was REMEMBERING, instead of simply ingesting, the experiences just by taking in the written words. Lyn must truly have the ability to travell in time as well as space. An awe-inspiring book, indeed!