Hazel Rochman (Booklist, June 1993 (Vol. 89, No. 19 & 20))
Between the blast of commercials and the blur of fast forward, we all have lonely places where private memories tremble and slip away. That uncertainty, that elusiveness, is the mood of this fine anthology in which poets from all over the world capture the echoing quiet "when the game has ended." As in her acclaimed collections Under All Silences (1987) and Time Is the Longest Distance (1991), Gordon includes many poems in translation, with lots this time from Spanish, Russian, and Yiddish. The settings and subjects are universal: nature (sea, animals, woods, snow) and play and memory. What's extraordinary is how absence is made physical, as in Dilys Laing's "Lost, Stolen, Strayed," in which a lost dog is there--a shivering presence wherever you look. Nothing is abstract or messagey, whether it's the sense of "snow flopping off roofs" in Pasternak's Russia, or the knot of anguish and tenderness when Dona Luongo Stein braids her sister's hair. The poems aren't easy; you'll get little if you skim through the collection. But the design is spacious, with large, clear type, each poem alone on a page; and even if readers don't get it all right away, individual lines will haunt them, especially in those moments when, as Octavio Paz says, "Nothing is real but the fog." Category: Older Readers. 1993, HarperCollins, $15 and $14.89. Gr. 8-12. Starred Review.
(Hazel Rochman (Booklist, June 1993 (Vol. 89, No. 19 & 20))
Won: Editors' Choice: Books for Youth, 1993 ; American Library Association-Booklist; United States