Groaning and Singing

Our memory is the only help that is left to them. Theodor Adorno's words, the epigraph of Judy Kronenfeld's poem, "Saving the Dead," epitomize a central theme of her elegiac, yet life-affirming collection that would prevent memory from drifting "into the dilating voids of space." Groaning and Singing invokes ancestors known and unknown and evokes the stories of parents and wider family in the particularity that demonstrates the truths and gifts of their lives. It evokes communities: the urban lonely, the women, "blotched / and spotted, with our walkers / and canes," gathered in "Shearly Beloved," even the sufferers of the "incandescently unimaginable" pain of history-violence, oppression, disease. But also present is the now of gratefulness: for "morning, morning! / commonplace and miraculous," for sudden joy, "like dripping fistfuls of sequin confetti / flung into the air and hanging for a moment / crackling like fireworks."