In
poems that move us from Europe in the 1930s to Canada in the twenty-first
century, Merle Nudelman strings lyric pearls against a panorama of the
holocaust and a Jewish family's emigration to Canada.
She filigrees a web of delicate family interconnections that holds fast despite the rending winds of war and the felt traumas that can only be recollected in peacetime.
Here is a poet who
knows in her bones what a lyric moment can mean, and who works in her
poetry toward those gemlike instances of Borrowed Light when we fully
understand what it means to thrive.
- Molly Peacock.
Merle Nudelman
Merle
Nudelman is a lawyer and lives in Toronto. She has studied poetry writing
with Rhea Tregebov, Laura Lush, Kenneth Sherman, Molly Peacock and Bruce
Meyer. Her poems have appeared in various Canadian literary journals including
Parchment, Kaleidoscope: An International Journal of Poetry, Pagitica
in Toronto, White Wall Review, and Another Toronto Quarterly.
Merle's poetry was
praised in a review in the Canadian Jewish News. "Merle Nudelman
captures what Frost called 'the lump in the throat'". Her poem, Food
Warfare, won an Honourable Mention in the Scarborough Arts Council Poetry
Contest 2000.
Sample Poems from Merle Nudelman's Borrowed Light
Wedding Day
Gentle in sepia tones
the solemn couple, heads touching,
rest heavy eyes on the camera's heart.
They look beyond the tiny bridal circle
to shadow faces, phantom witnesses to this hasty day,
short months after the war.
She in a suit of navy, notched collar of white,
unadorned waves loosening at her neck.
He in white shirt, cravat and grey tweed.
Borrowed clothes, borrowed light.
Two lost children grasping.
In the brown cave of their eyes burns
the blackness of knowing.
Traces
He looks over his shoulder.
I suck in girlish breath, grab my chance -
bend close to his left forearm,
peek at the tender pale flesh.
Broken blue spiders creep up his arm towards the crook
of his elbow. He catches me staring.
"What's that, Daddy?"
He arranges his mouth in a tiny smile, says,
"It's my old telephone number. I put it there, never to forget."
Mama wears her numbers under cover of sleeves,
hastily hidden
when my eyes cloud with query.
I want to run my fingers over the secret
sealed on my parents' skin,
take away the sting that marks them.
The Inheritance
He stashes away pennies end to end,
stuffs bills in closet pockets,
ready just in case.
Chestnuts for later,
nuggets for the kids.
He bends her and she stretches
her stipend for food and such,
nods when he shuns travel
and restaurant fare.
She dies and he says,
"I've seen so little,"
talks of trips to Vegas,
a new model car.
Gets as far as I should when
blackness takes him.
They trickle down.
These dollars stained
with fear's sweat,
edges rubbed thin
with time and waiting.
Creating a poem is
a kind of meditation, an exploration of a moment, a feeling, a memory,
an event which often takes you to unexpected places. Analytical thought
is suspended in this quest for understanding. Through my poems I see fragments
of the world more clearly, catch glimmers of deeper meanings, explore
my reality and that of others. I believe that the poems are healing and
enriching both for the poet and for the reader.
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