Böcker av Richard Chess

A house on a leaf is a precarious and fanciful construction, yet it gracefully covers the leaves of Richard Chess's third book of poetry, Third Temple. Painted by Edita Pollaková, a child caught in the dislocation and catastrophe of the Holocaust, this watercolor preserves an audacious, innocent vision of structure and renewal against all odds. It is just such structure and renewal that Chess's poems seek as they sing, shout, whisper, accuse, tease, twist, and mourn. Animal sacrifice and blood libel, the Zohar and Solomon ibn Gabirol and Tevye set them going. Languages, too, for some of the poems include Hebrew as they sing of the scattering of kingdoms, the dispelling of names, and the "aleph bet" of being. No ordinary temple, this book. Let it challenge and delight you with language lessons that won't leave.

In Love Nailed to the Doorpost, Richard Chess offers poems and lyrical prose inspired and informed equally by the pleasures and pressures of everyday life and by sacred and secular texts ranging from Torah to Basho to Robert Creeley. This new work transports us from the biblical past to the present, from creation stories to stories of brotherly struggle to meditations on married and family love. Love--that's the the thing, whether spontaneously arising or commanded, as it is, the commandment to love inscribed on parchment, rolled up and tucked into a small case, a mezuzah, and nailed to the doorpost of the house. You shall love: the challenges of fulfilling that commandment, and the joy and transformation one experiences when on does: that's what Chess's powerful new work explores.

These poems search for compatibility between contemporary consciousness and a rich, ancient liturgical tradition. Specifically, they explore the deep feelings of joy and regret, shame and hope associated with the Days of Awe, the Jewish High Holidays, beginning with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and concluding with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Tekiah refers to the sound of the shofar, the ceremonial ram's horn that is blown to commemorate the beginning of creation. The sound also recalls the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, the destruction of the Temple, and the binding of Isaac, and anticipates as well the reunification of the Jews of the Diaspora. Finally, and perhaps most important, it serves as an entreaty to the Jewish people to perform teshuvah, to return to God.