What Is Good

by Hilda Raz

Paperback

Published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book of poems about being a poet. Hilda Raz writes about encounters of everyday life, conversations, and underlying philosophical thoughts, often self-referential about the fact that she is sitting and writing, or thinking about writing.

“I dream about a fluent woman
trapped in a flood of language,
a living flux her body interrupts.”

This is poetry for poets, as most poetry tends to be. I didn’t enjoy the overall voice very much. I’ve always been taught that poetry has to be agonizingly precise, each and every word questioned and chosen for a specific reason. I find that writing poetry in this way can make it turn out somewhat cryptic. Personally, what I want out of poetry is not a sense that I have solved a puzzle but a feeling of inherent human understanding, and a broadening release. There were many isolated lines in this collection that gave me that feeling (referring to the horizon as a bowl, just gorgeous. Referring to a young woman as “hurt like the rest of us but for the first time,” too true), but no full poem as a complete work was able to do that for me.
I enjoyed it more or less, but it often felt too wordy and lost my attention.

[Rae · Rating 3 out of 5]

This Jewish poet was profiled in The Confidence Woman. The poetic themes include family, death, and her ethnic and religious heritage.