Under the Dome

This edition simultaneously marks the centenary of Paul Celan's birth (1920) and the 50th anniversary of his suicide (1970); surely reviewers will welcome the opportunity to write about Celan that this book will provide, particularly as it deals with the period leading up to and beyond his death. A return of sorts of Paul Celan to City Lights. The first publication of Celan's work in English was in Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Pocket Poet Series: New Young German Poets (1959), edited by Jerome Rothenberg. The last book in English by Paul Celan, Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry was published by FSG in 2014. This book uniquely offers pathways into sharing—and learning from—the experience of one of France’s greatest contemporary poets, as he moves back in time towards his early understanding of his poetic vocation via a burgeoning friendship and work-relationship with one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. This book offers the unique experience of one of today’s great “elder” poets (on the international scene) retelling—in the manner of a poet, of course—how probably the most important poet to emerge from the shadows of the Nazi genocide offered, and still offers us, invaluable insight into how and why poetic art matters to those grappling with recent historical and political catastrophe—and to those hoping to prevent its recurrences, in the era of Trump, Bolsonaro, Salvini, Modi, Erdogan, and others. What probably makes it most unique for us today is that—finding its place in the ongoing publication of personal memoirs about the historical reception of the Holocaust and its aftermaths, and among the publication of memoirs about artistic apprenticeships, this book melds the two. It does so by offering a “telling” that, in form and content, is at once lucid and haunting: for it gives us the story of perhaps the poet to “emerge from the ashes,” and likewise the story of what that poet and his work has to tell us about art—and about life—since then and, above all, today. Events in SF, LA, NY, Chicago