A History of the Sweetness of the World compels us to consider the world we live in. Michael Lieberman is a physician-poet who, from the vantage of middle age, has given us a book that celebrates and savors even as it documents loss and judges.
The pace of American life in the nineties has left us frayed. We live in a divided and divisive world with little time to heal it or ourselves. This book challenges us to heal by locating the sweet and the bitter-sweet even as we recognize the bitter. The poet "would get down on his hands and knees and thank God for color vision," even as he despairs of having "brailleless beggars in the streets."
This is a book about sweetness in which poems have titles like "Loss" and "Regret" as well as "Lucky." The book also contains poems that are mysterious, that cannot be grasped in a simple way: "Extraction" and "Eleven Views of the Bayou at Chimney Rock" with its quiet homage to Paul Celan can only be experienced. Like the world itself there is no rational, logical summary of these poems. The poems in this collection are written about our world--our only world--and the only way we can heal it or ourselves is to be fully present. To experience it completely, we must step back from it. We are fortunate to have these poems to help us.
Why Should I Clone the Genes of Simon Srebnik? What would I understand if I knew
the sequence of his DNA, could place
him in perspective with Cro-Magnon,
patriarchs, his ancestors, my ancestors?
If I knew his story in detail?
Nine hours of "Shoah" is a man singing, a Jew,
in soft focus in a small boat on a small river
in the morning. He is drifting by mounds
of coarse hair and shoes in my living room.
A Jew in a boat. A Jew in a boat
singing in Polish is beyond oscilloscopes.
I am humming a song I cannot hear,
a melody I do not know, accompanying
a man remembering a youth he does not remember.
He is impounded o a reel of tape,
trying to moor a past in the present.
With a warble older than the song, he frames
a sweetness measured only in angstroms.
