Velvel’s Violin

Description

by Saphra, Jacqueline | Literature & literary studies
Published 06/07/2023 by Nine Arches Press in the United Kingdom
Paperback | 72 pages

Velvel’s Violin, a deeply moving and political fifth collection by TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Jacqueline Saphra places us on the shifting ground between past and present. Through its search for missing histories of the Jewish diaspora, the book is a call for empathy and a warning to a world where the legacy of the Holocaust echoes current narratives of prejudice, war, displacement, and migration. Saphra’s precisely-tuned writing ranges through tones of dark humour, lyrical beauty and moments of transcendent joy to find assonance between the turbulence of now and a family history of fragmented stories, irreparable loss and miraculous escapes.

Between each poem – forgotten songs, weeping forests, buried violins – sound and silence combine to speak of love, absence and survival.