Seder E-Book

Adam Kammerling

• Herausgeber: Out-Spoken Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 28

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The innovative debut collection from Adam Kammerling, Seder is an archived and deft account of a person reckoning with their heritage and family history. Hybrid, dexterous and informed, Kammerling retraces his Jewish heritage back to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, as poems fluctuate through time and space, leaving us with a forbidding sense that what has changed over recent decades is not enough.

Leseprobe

Published by Out-Spoken Press,

Unit 39, Containerville

1 Emma Street

London, E2 9AH

All rights reserved

© Adam Kammerling

The rights of Adam Kammerling to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Out-Spoken Press.

First edition published 2020

ISBN: 978-1-8380211-4-6

ePub ISBN: 978-1-8380211-6-0

Typeset in Adobe Caslon

Design by Patricia Ferguson

Printed and bound by Print Resources

Out-Spoken Press is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Seder

For Walter and Herta Kammerling

Contents

in the grass

so tell us

what faith

let us say

we return to when

for my grandfather the demob centre

look

emerging in Theresienstadt

practice

blood. darkness.

it is not propaganda’s task

but for the louse

thousands

I once read

we return to when

orange orange orange orange

now I am

in the moment

when I have drunk less

except my brothers used to watch me

it is nothing

Schwerbelastungskörper

before the kilning of the planets

through water

swimming

where is safe when

orange

swimming

to get away

why is this night different

now I’m throwing

the baker

my horsefly

then a man then a man

sssh

did you know

I select my own

simply

substances deadly to goldfish

I am watching

onto this scene

notice

my mum wanted girls

the river is where

now I know

Notes

Acknowledgments

Titles are included as reference points, and as bridges. While each poem can be taken individually, they belong to this lineage of texts.

pl. Seders, or Sederim. Judaism. A ritual feast commemorating the exodus of the Jews from Egypt held on the first nights of Passover. Origin of Seder Hebrew: seder – order, arrangement.

in the grass

they declared our blood

the wrong shade

I was not murdered here with Aunt Ruth

I pick up a beetle with two fingers

                                     watch its belly palpitate

there is a goldfish in the horse pond

a white stork stood at the barracks

                  so tell us

       Reverend Father in this school assembly of

dust and new smells how you found god in the Cold

War’s failing liver; the jungle training your eye to pick

skulls through the scope from fifty metres drop bodies

through windows tell us how you came back changed

married your sweetheart for a dowry of cornbread and

then your daughter snatched from school by a man

you knew he took her for two days nearly

ending your life in half-knowing your knuckle-pit

screaming rife in the closet ammo in the drawers

rifle       rifle       rifle        rifle       tell us

father that you crouched darkly in his garden your

face shoeblack blurred to pop his head like a grape

this whole gymnasium’s fraying their sleeves tell us

your index finger opened and then closed the glass

circle to make the wall wet with him but you won’t

tell us how she came back changed and you father

stroke the hair lock from her face but the screaming

bushes to bathroom window but the equation that