A poet whose cultures are his bread

January 18, 2006 This is the first book of poetry by Nathan Wasserman, revealed as a surprisingly mature writer of evocative images. The selection is varied and includes poems set in Jerusalem, where he lives: “The starlings above the hospital pines have disappeared/ disappeared from Bikur Cholim and Misgav Ladakh. At the very edge of my childhood/ startled, I would watch them from the bus station. How they cut/ the coral body of the evening with their cries, like a paper cutter wielded by a madman/ and fell asleep on the short nights at the end of summer, between the dark branches, breathless and trembling.”

The above may be found in the opening section of the book, called “Birds and Seasons,” which I like especially, perhaps because of the birds or because of the picturesque and sensual nature within. There are also poems in dialogue with other locations and with other cultures, as the book’s second section “Hellas” hints, and in which Wasserman moves from the personal to the mythological, for example, in “Odysseus”: “Evening arrives and the children, damp-haired/ laugh, grow distant from me, as I lean on the rail,/ converting days into the folds of wet sails.”

Sappho is apparently the inspiration for a group of poems within this section called “Hellenistic Fragments”: “Crumbs of honey roll under your bed,/ your hands heavy on my body. Oh, you, stripper of peels,/ Adonis of ripe fruit.” There are poems conversing with Sumerian, Babylonian and Ugaritic myths, and these are especially rich, reverberating with myth and music. “What was Red at that time? Purple was the name/ of the color of fabrics, rolled according to the Hittite measure, and lifted up every year, a levy to the king,/ the great sun governing under protection of the storm god./ Was the color so heavy that it became the name for any royal tribute?”

Those who know that Wasserman is an Assyriologist will not be surprised at the broad sweep of time in his poetry, which makes the past, be it near or very far, present for us, and the way he treats cultural phenomena with an intimacy that transgresses borders.

Excerpted from “A Poet Whose Cultures are His Bread” Ha'aretz8 November 2002. A review of Breaking the Bread, Poems by Nathan Wasserman, [In Hebrew] Tel Aviv: Helicon Pegasus Series, 2000