Archangel

by Henry Shukman

It has been over a decade since Henry Shukman published his award-winning first collection, In Doctor No’s Garden . Now, in his greatly anticipated second collection, he explores a little-known piece of Jewish history, in a sequence of poems that forms the centerpiece of this book. In 1917, several thousand Jewish tailors were deported from London and shipped back to Archangel and the Russian Empire they had recently fled, ostensibly to fight on the Eastern Front. They arrived just as the Revolution was unfolding and the old regime was collapsing into chaos. Among them were Shukman’s grandfather and great-uncle, and these poems chronicle their four-year struggle to return to their wives and children in London. With poems on loss and mortality, on love in difficult circumstances, and on the familiar themes of childhood and family relationships, Archangel tells the stories of many journeys—from youth to maturity, from loss back into love—and the migrations of Shukman’s Jewish grandparents are echoed in his own move with his wife and family from England to New Mexico. Whatever the theme, though, these are all love poems lucid with intensity, bright with the longing for love—both its fleeting rapture and its slow contentment—and Archangel is a book of great reach, power, and beauty.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2013

About the author

Henry Shukman (IG: @henryshukman) is an authorized Zen Master in the Sanbo Zen lineage, and is spiritual director emeritus of Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

He is the co-founder and lead meditation teacher for The Way, a meditation app that provides a modern update to the ancient path of meditation training. He also leads meditation courses and retreats.

Henry is an award-winning poet and author, whose memoir One Blade of Grass recounts his own journey through meditation practice. His new book Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening is a manual and map describing the four key zones of meditation practice. Original Love is now available for pre-order, and will be published in early July, 2024.

His struggles and traumatic experiences as a youth, combined with a spontaneous awakening experience at 19, and many years of training under several teachers, paved the way for his developing a well-rounded approach to healing and awakening through meditation.
(copied from Amazon Web page

Reviews

[Cooch · Rating 5 out of 5]

4 1/2 stars

There are no weak poems here. Shukman's signature style continues on from his previous volume. There are some excellent and exceptional poems, but less than in the previous book and the range in subject matter is perhaps narrower. On the other hand, the set of interconnected 'history' poems are very strong indeed.

[Vishvapani · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems are eloquent but not showy, personal but not extravagant. Lots of feelings, some of them very strong, all expressed with modesty and accuracy.

I enjoyed the central sequence, exploring the story of Jewish immigrants to the UK who were deported back to Russia in 1917. It's a fascinating piece of lost history, but I most appreciated the exploration of how it feels to be at the end of such a story - the sense of connection and of estrangement: 'the absence that I come from' as HS puts it.

On a first reading I found the poems in the final section strongest. They are also the most personal and evocative. Here's a brief taste of the understated image-making power here, the immediacy and suggestiveness:

The mountains are icebergs
that have drifted out of childhood
to the rim of this night
to see if we remember them,
how big they are, how pale.