Nine Arches Press Velvels Violin.

by Jacqueline Saphra

Velvel's Violin, a deeply moving and political fifth collection by TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Jacqueline Saphra places us on the shifting ground between past and present. Through its search for missing histories of the Jewish diaspora, the book is a call for empathy and a warning to a world where the legacy of the Holocaust echoes current narratives of prejudice, war, displacement, and migration.

Saphra's precisely-tuned writing ranges through tones of dark humour, lyrical beauty and moments of transcendent joy to find assonance between the turbulence of now and a family history of fragmented stories, irreparable loss and miraculous escapes. Between each poem - forgotten songs, weeping forests, buried violins - sound and silence combine to speak of love, absence and survival.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

Published July 5, 2023

Reviews

[Anja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prescient, beautiful book

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an impulse buy in a London bookstore last summer because of the Chagall on the cover. Saphra’s 2023 collection centers around Jewish culture and identity. The standout poems are “Poland, 1985,” “Going to Bed with Hitler,” “The News and the Blackbird,” and “Love.”