A Little Treasury Of Love Poems

In this collection of essays, stories, and poems, award-winning poet and fiction writer Myra Sklarew traces a journey across the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Her point of view is Jewish, though her subjects include science, exile, the future, the Holocaust, the remaining Jewish community of Morocco, Yiddish poetry, the visual arts, and teaching. Many of these pieces deal with personal subjects—the search for a grandfather's birthplace, the death of a mother, the profound effect of a teacher, the struggle of a woman to embrace Judaism. Whether writing about medicine, Messiah, or the first speech of an infant, Sklarew's work finds its roots in Judaism, a Judaism fashioned in large part by the author's own hands. Ultimately, the book is about access, about following one's own curiosity despite the obstacles that might appear along the way. And it is about a kind of belief: that nothing will be wasted, that all that we can learn will have a place in our lives eventually, though we may not know its purpose at the time.

The book, Little Treasures Love Poems, reveals a combination of thoughtful reminders of love and its many facets. There may be various treasures that we have forgotten and some we cant forget. There are parts of life that you may treasure, when others may not see your perspective. In this book, there are feelings of expectation and outlook of love that are colorful and full of passion. This may captivate and intrigue your viewpoints of love. We all have different treasures; its the reasoning behind what we choose to accept or deny. Nevertheless, evolve your life, and find other treasures that await you.

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Qiu Xiaolong is extravagantly qualified for translating these poems, having as a citizen of China won prizes for his own poetry and for translating T.S. Eliot and other English and American poets into Chinese and, more recently, as a citizen of the United States, won prizes for his own poetry and fiction in English. To my mind, the Changgan Song in this collection rivals Ezra Pound's justly famous, loosely translated version, The River Merchant's Wife. These renderings have a limpidity of the language and metaphor and a subtle rhythm, and Qiu has a poet's sixth sense for when (occasionally) to lift the line with a less direct and more evocative word; we are thus rescued from the flatness of some translations of early Chinese poetry. This is a generous book and a very welcome addition to the poetry of love and longing from our Significant Stranger, the Chinese nation. --Mona Van Duyn.