We Pass Each Other on the Road

We all know it, this road, of course. But still: what road is this? Pirkei Avot (4:22) answers: "..against your will were you formed, against your will were you born, against your will you live, against your will you will die, and against your will you will give an account..." These poems by Hanoch Guy Kaner are poems of "against." An oyfshtand--an uprising, an insurrection against death's occupation and usurpation of life. For this road, we know too, is old age, sickness, and death. In these poems it is as if the Hebrew Kohelet meets a Japanese Zen death poem. Though this is not all of what Hanoch Guy Kaner is saying in his intimately personal, familial, epic and mythic way. He sends his poetic personae out 'on the road' to "give an account." Which they do with precision-irony, tenderness, outrage and compassion, while past-present-future inseparably, indiscriminately, simultaneously pass them by. The lives of his poems' characters--their sicknesses, old age and death, these are Hanoch Guy Kaner's lives too. He and they: not one, not two.

And the poet, Hanoch Guy Kaner, where is he on this road? He's with Yiddish poet Peretz Markish who says the past does not belong to him but he dreamt it, that he does not belong to the future but he is dreamt by it, that he is in 'the nothing now' in which he and it are born and die together. Gesshu Soko wrote: "Living, dying, coming, going -- / Like two arrows meeting in flight / In the midst of nothingness / There is a road that goes directly / to my true home." The poems in this collection do not speak of such a road or "true home"; the people of these poems are not aware of such. Maybe, in a future collection, Hanoch Guy Kaner will give us poems about that road home. For now, in these poems, there is only this road on which he views us all passing each other. To where we and he are going, as we all pass each other by, he won't say.

Robert Margolis