The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff: Vol. 1, 1918-1936

Charles Reznikoff is a poet who, expanding on the imagists Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, helped shaped the idea for the Objectivists poets. Reading his poetry is quite enjoyable because, while his poetry is fairly simple in form and subject matter, he provides clever, witty haiku-like poems through the process of observation. He observes things and writes about them in his poetry and it becomes rather humorous because the reader thinks to themselves, "I never thought of it like that before." For example, in one of his poems entilted "Epitaph," he writes, "Not the five feet of water to your chin but the inch above the tip of your nose." The Jewish history sections of his poetry are much more serious and lengthy. In the sections, King David and Israel, Reznikoff narrates Biblical-based events. In other of his sections, such as the Fourth and Fifth groups of verse, he deals with the gloomy effects of poverty and alienation. I would definitely recommend this book for anyone interested in poetry that uses concise imagery and language.

Charles Reznikoff's poetry almost always come as a welcome revelation to those who have never read him. Here is a poet who takes us deep into the material and spiritual essence of the 20th-century urban environment, and well beyond that--into the recesses of Jewish history and culture and a great variety of other topics as well. His great themes are adaptiveness, tenacity, resilience and the surprising nature of human beings under duress. These are poems that astonish and delight, again and again.

Reznikoff is a poet in whose work there has been a revival of interest in recent years. His poems are often snapshots of everyday life, in accord with the Objectivist doctrine he shared with Zukofsky, Fenellosa, and others. In an illuminating essay on Reznikoff's total work the writer Hillel Halkin points out that much of Reznikoff's poetry approaches prose, lacks metaphor. Halkin however adds that Reznikoff does have at times a real vitality in his verse, a special power of rhythm, and that he has in his work produced ten or twelve poems of outstanding quality. Halkin also says that while many call Reznikoff the most Jewish of Jewish American poets his Jewish subject poems are often simply retellings of Biblical stories. Halkin sees that Reznikoff's poems at their best have a haiku like quality and surprise in their quality of perception.