A Prague Spring, Before & After by Michael Salcman
Winner of the 2015 Sinclair Prize
A Prague Spring, Before & After, Poems by Michael Salcman
Cover and author’s photo: Lynn Silverman, Prague Castle and the Charles Bridge (2015)
Read A Prague Spring, Before & After on Google Books A Prague Spring, Before & After available on Kindle or read below
A Prague Spring is a beautiful blend of the lyric imagination with historical and autobiographical facts. In this book, ignorance, cruelty, and murder lose. Art, and the truth, wins. THOMAS LUX, Bourne Chair in Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award and Author of God Particles
A work of great rage, sorrow, and love, Michael Salcman’s majestic A Prague Spring tells an almost unbearable story that needs to be told over and over and never forgotten. Beginning with coldly matter-of-fact poems of family members lost to and escaping the Shoah, Salcman documents how his parents survived and met, and how he got along in Brooklyn, the glorious borough of his childhood, baseball’s Dodgers, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Finally, he doubles back to visit the country of his birth. And in a series of stunning poems, a prose piece, and a tonal poem to his cousin Magda, Salcman ties together past and present, and gives us one more glimpse into the soul of a survivor, two really, his older cousin, and himself. ROBERT COOPERMAN, Author of In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains, winner of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry
A Prague Spring is a near-epic book of history poems, interweaving the story of Prague with the Holocaust, family deaths and survivals, a book that stuns the reader with the enormities and sorrows of Time. Salcman uses the compression of narrative, meditative and lyric poetry to “bring you looted treasures: History’s twisted snakes.” Kafka and Salcman’s ancestors haunt the Czech capital where “a pile of dust once pushed a cart of salt and spices / on a medieval street.” The poems revisit totalitarian defenestrations, slaughters and repressions as they recount, wonder and pray. At once autobiography, history, testimonial and memorial, A Prague Spring is a revolutionary collection of important and necessary poems, confidently written and—especially with Salcman’s tonal skills—always absorbing; it is further deepened by how perfectly Lynn Silverman’s dark photographs of Prague capture that ancient city’s shadows and ghosts. DICK ALLEN, Connecticut State Poet Laureate (2010–2015) and Author of This Shadowy Place, Present Vanishing, and Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected
LYNN SILVERMAN is a professor of photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Her photographs are internationally shown and collected. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to the Czech Republic.
He has poems in Evening Street Review numbers 2, 4, 7, 9, 14, 15, 21, 28:
Read: “If A Young Man Should Die Alone” p. 96 Evening Street Review No 2
Read: “1942, A Calendar” pp. 24-27 & “1944” pp. 142-147 Evening Street Review No 4
Read: “The Copper Penny” pp. 82-83 Evening Street Review No 7
Read: “Prague Suite” pp. 60-63, Evening Street Review No 9
Read: “No Tropical Trees Grow in Baltimore” Evening Street Review No 15
Read: “The Good Tourist” Evening Street Review No 21 page 83
Read: Mortality’s First Tingle, 101 Cordon Sanitaire ,101 The Hours, 102 Evening Street Review No 28
