Collected Poems

by Primo Levi, Brian Swann (Translator), Ruth Feldman (Translator)

Poems deal with the experiences of concentration camp prisoners, and nature, science, and chess

Genres: Poetry, Italy, Holocaust, Italian Literature, Fiction, 20th Century, Jewish

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Primo Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor whose literary work has had a profound impact on how the world understands the Holocaust and its aftermath. Born in Turin in 1919, he studied chemistry at the University of Turin and graduated in 1941. During World War II, Levi joined the Italian resistance, but was captured by Fascist forces in 1943. Because he was Jewish, he was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944, where he endured ten harrowing months before being liberated by the Red army.

After the war, Levi returned to Turin and resumed work as a chemist, but also began writing about his experiences. His first book, If This Is a Man (published in the U.S. as Survival in Auschwitz), is widely regarded as one of the most important Holocaust memoirs ever written. Known for its clarity, restraint, and moral depth, the book offers a powerful testimony of life inside the concentration camp. Levi went on to write several more works, including The Truce, a sequel recounting his long journey home after liberation, and The Periodic Table, a unique blend of memoir and scientific reflection, in which each chapter is named after a chemical element.

Throughout his writing, Levi combined scientific precision with literary grace, reflecting on human dignity, morality, and survival. His later works included fiction, essays, and poetry, all characterized by his lucid style and philosophical insight. Levi also addressed broader issues of science, ethics, and memory, positioning himself as a key voice in post-war European literature.

Despite his success, Levi struggled with depression in his later years, and in 1987 he died after falling from the stairwell of his apartment building in Turin. While officially ruled a suicide, the exact circumstances of his death remain a subject of debate. Nevertheless, his legacy endures. Primo Levi’s body of work remains essential reading for its deep humanity, intellectual rigor, and unwavering commitment to bearing witness.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short collection of poems some of them quite rare, from a writer who I believe should have won the Nobel Prize. These range from good to exceptional, I only wish he had written more expansive poetry during his lifetime, but he has left the world a body of work that shall stand the test of time, from the viewpoint of someone who witnessed one of mankind's darkest moments, and lived to tell his tales.

[Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Primo Levi survived Auschwitz, and his poems are largely preoccupied with this experience. Like many writers who deal with genocide, he must aim at communicating horrors that are virtually incommunicable. His skeletal language is stripped to a probing of fundamentals:

"Consider whether this is a man,
Who labors in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no."

In later poems, Levi examines the hardships of various figures from classical antiquity, including a remarkable poem about the death of Pliny from the ash of Mt. Vesuvius ("We're ash ourselves; remember Epicurus?").

If Levi's poems affirm any notion of eternity, it is the eternity of senseless suffering. Levi's galaxy of pain extends even to Hannibal's elephants, in a poem from 1984:

"A bold blind man tried for a long time
To find my heart with his lance-point.
I've hurled my useless dying trumpeting
At these peaks,
Livid in the sunset: 'Absurd, absurd.'"

[māris šteinbergs · Rating 5 out of 5]

and of course, one of my absolute literature and life icons, does it again. he is as good in poetry as he is in non-fiction and everything else

[BAM doesn’t answer to her real name · Rating 4 out of 5]

I honestly do not see how anyone can rate anything Levi rates as less than 4. He’s such a blessed, special man, a genuine Survivor .

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Se questo è un uomo

Voi che vivete sicuri
nelle vostre tiepide case,
voi che trovate tornando a sera
il cibo caldo e visi amici:
Considerate se questo è un uomo
che lavora nel fango
che non conosce pace
che lotta per mezzo pane
che muore per un si o per un no.
Considerate se questa è una donna,
senza capelli e senza nome
senza più forza di ricordare
vuoti gli occhi e freddo il grembo
come una rana d'inverno.
Meditate che questo è stato:
vi comando queste parole.
Scolpitele nel vostro cuore
stando in casa andando per via,
coricandovi, alzandovi.
Ripetetele ai vostri figli.
O vi si sfaccia la casa,
la malattia vi impedisca,
i vostri nati torcano il viso da voi.

[Bro_Pair أعرف · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some excellent poems in here, but most are disappointing. Levi's at his best when he's writing in a hangdog kind of deadpan; in "Unfinished Business" he slyly uses a flat affect to evince probably one of the funnier portraits of a failed artist I've seen in a while. And he is really good writing about animals. Read all the poems in this named for animals.

[Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

What weight. What strong swelling suffering. Made me light a candle and pray.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm somewhat torn as far as how to rate this collection. The first 20 pages contain the best poems, which were written, for the most part, around 1946. These are searing Holocaust poems, and they will stay with you. It's amazing that Levi wrote so soon (and so well) after his experience in Auschwitz. Catharsis, yes, but to see such pain transformed into such diamond like poetry (and I'm reading a translation) so close to the event, is something I find to be remarkable. However, as a result, the collection seems front-loaded. The best stuff first. What follows are solid poems, some that are very good, but nothing that approaches the intense immediacy of those first 20 pages. The later poems remind me a quite a bit of the great Polish poets (Herbert, Milosz, Zagajewski, and Szymborska), just not as good. But Levi was known more as memoirist anyway, and this collection represents only a small portion of his contributions to literature.

Update 9/20/2009: I went back and read a number poems that were not from the first 20 pages (Levi's Holocaust poems). As I said above, the first twenty pages are immediate, powerful, and from Levi's p.o.v., necessary in order to get on with his life. When looking at the rest of the collection, this is indeed what he did. There was some controversy regarding Levi's death (a fatal fall that some thought was in fact a suicidal jump). If a final darkness had fallen on Levi, I don't think it's evidenced in these poems. And at their best, they can stand side by side w/ poems by the great poets I've listed above. That's because these poems do teach -- and they do warn. What more could a poet than succeed as both teacher and prophet? When he writes such lines as the below (from the poem Dromedary), the reader senses not finger-wagging, but a hard wisdom earned:

. . .We, rebellious offspring
With great brainpower, little sense,
Will destroy, defile,
Always more feverishly.
Very soon we will extend the desert
Into the Amazon forests,
Into the living hearts of our cities,
Into our very hearts.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Agree with Bro_Pair's review: some great poems mixed with a lot of disappointments. The animal ones, though, are fantastic. And of course the ones reflecting on the Holocaust are haunting and somber.

To be fair to Levi, he points out that he's not a poet and some of them are little more than scribblings he occasionally jotted down when he couldn't convey it in prose. And the ones that work are, despite his own misgivings, excellent. Maybe some of the best poetry I've ever read.

Favourites: Arachne, Unfinished Business, Wait, Shema, Sunset at Fossoli, Epitaph, Song of the Crow I, For Adolf Eichmann, Get Up, The Glacier, February 25, 1944, Old Mole, A Mouse, Meleagrina, The Snail, The Elephant, The Fly, The Dromedary.

Epitaph

You, traveler on the hill, one among many
Who leave marks on this no longer lonely snow,
Listen to me: pause for a few moments
Here where my comrades buried me without tears:
Where every summer, fed by me, the tender field grass
Grows thicker and greener than elsewhere.
It’s not many years that I’ve been lying here, Micca the partisan,
Killed by my comrades for my not insignificant crime,
And I hadn’t lived many more when the shadow took me.

Passerby, I don’t ask forgiveness of you or others,
No prayer or lament, no special observance.
I ask just one thing: that this peace of mine will last,
That heat and cold will alternate above me always,
And no new blood filtered through the soil
Seeps down with its deadly warmth
To wake to new pain these bones now turned to stone.

October 6, 1952

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved his poetry, meaningful and heartfelt. Just a touch of sinister which I love. I really enjoyed the metaphors, although I did feel a bit disorientated - as i think my brain does not compute the style as well as I would love to.

I absolutely LOVED this piece


CHESS

Only my enemy for all time,
The abominable black queen,
Has had nerve equal to mine
In helping her inept king.
Inept and cowardly mine too — that’s understood.
From the very start he crouched
Behind his row of plucky pawns,
Then fled across the chessboard,
Askew, absurd, with little stumbling steps.
Battles are not for kings.
But I!
If I had not been there!
Rooks and horses, yes, but I!
Powerful and ready, upright and diagonal,
Far-reaching as a catapult,
I pierced their defences.
They had to bow their heads,
The fraudulent, haughty black ones.
Victory intoxicates like a wine.

Now it’s all over,
The skill and hatred are spent.
A mighty hand has swept us away,
Weak and strong, cautious, wise and mad,
Whites and blacks every which way, lifeless.
Then, with a clatter of gravel, it threw us
Into the black wooden box
And closed the lid.
When will we play again?

[Jenni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mostly known for his gripping memoirs, but he's also an excellent poet.

[Angie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a pity that he didn't write more poems in his lifetime - this was a good collection and left me wanting to read more.

[Jeremy Tibbetts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Levi's poetry is tragic and sweeping, epic and lonely. Some of them are difficult to read, some of them are pleasing, but all deserve a read through.

[Cassie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful.

[Edith · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my opinion, this book is a must-read. That is all.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved his poetry. It's meaningful and heartfelt and I felt that they were some of the best poems I've read.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of poetry that is both dark and beautiful, spanning from the mid-40's just after the poet was released from the German concentration camps where he spent a couple of years after his capture as a partisan in German-occupied Italy to the 1980's, when he died after having devoted himself to writing for the previous ten years after retirement.  In a way, the author never fully left the war, as these collected poems demonstrate that even as an old man reflecting on death that he wrestled with the questions of Jewish identity, the way in which everyone was an enemy of everyone else and of themselves, and of the questions of justice and divine providence that would naturally follow experience like his own.  He never felt at peace, and always wondered about the jack-booted soldiers knocking on his door, so that the nightmare would begin again.  Experience as traumatic as the author's was sublimated into beautiful poems that allow the reader to visualize life in postwar Italy and the way that it was shaped by the harrowing experience of war and loss, and if the author is better known for writing other sorts of books, this collection of poems is still well-worth checking out.

These collected poems were originally published in the author's native Italian in a couple of collections titled Shema and Ad ora incerta, but were translated for this edition into English so that the works could reach a wider audience.  The translations are excellent, and they preserve something of the haunting quality of the original poems.  The most moving poems here deal with questions of life and death and of light and darkness, and perhaps my favorite of the whole collection are "Nachtwache," which makes use of a favorite biblical quotation of mine [1], and "Partisan," which portrays old partisans reuniting with creaking joints and suspicions about each other and deeply divided selves and the realization that their war is never over.  If one has to compare his work to other writers, it bears a strong resemblance to the expressiveness of a William Stafford (ironically enough a pacifist who spent his World War II in a work camp in the West Coast) or the haunted quality of a W.G. Sebald.  Here too the experience of war dramatically shaped the author and left his poetry deeply affected by the tragic experiences of war.

If one reads the notes to this book of poetry, one recognizes that the author makes a lot of allusions both to his own experience as well as to literature.  Often expressions and titles carry deep allusive layers.  "Nachtwache" is not only a reference to Isaiah with its discussion of the night watchman, but is also an expression that refers to an office within the concentration camps, blending the horrors of the prophetic judgment on an obscure Arabian city Dumah with the horrors of the concentration camp that the author experienced.  Likewise, there are poems that reference the death of Pliny the Elder in the eruption of Vesuvius as well as the Hebrew Bible and the writings of Dante.  One gets a sense of the moral and intellectual resources of a writer who could endure the suffering of hell on earth by reflecting on how this hell could be understood through literary allusions that somehow made sense of the inhumanity of man against man and the way that earth under the rule of wicked rulers like Hitler became a sort of infernal realm of injustice and suffering.  And yet the author did not wallow in that suffering, but turned it into beautiful art.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2010...

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I was prepared to declare Levi a great writer but not a great poet until I reached the second half of the collection, At an Uncertain Hour, beginning with poems written in the late 1970s. Something seemed to click at that point, and what had been rather pedestrian verse – including those written in the camp in the 1940s – transforms into a mature voice that explores rather than recounts. Although the spectre of the camps haunts these poems, there are just as many that use animal and nature imagery as a way to understand the human condition: snails, mice, spiders, elephants, and oysters. You can actually see Levi come into his own as a poet through the chronological arrangement of the poems. From what I understand, he began to devote himself to writing full-time by this point, which makes me wish he had done so sooner, or maybe lived a little longer to continue his development as a poet.

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Primo Levi really saw some terrible things, intense suffering and the worst of human nature; this is what really stood out to me in his poetry. There is a pervading sense that Levi is kind of haunted by what he experienced, and his acute awareness of death is almost omnipresent. Poems like ‘Buna’ really stood out to me as being a brilliantly poignant expression of the pain and trauma Levi must have seen. I also enjoyed his poems that used nature as a metaphor or theme, as it gave the sense that, naturally, the world is not a place of suffering, but we have made that way.
It not 5 stars because I felt as though there were a few poems which were misses, but overall it was great.

[Ryan Lafferty · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most moving collection of poems I have encountered. Levi's works were written during his life in a concentration camp and working as a scientist while the suffering of others caused him unimaginable survivor's guilt and writing in a depth of emotion that has never been seen before. These poems are as heavy as they are powerful; offering true insight into why Elie Wiesel described the author after taking his own life as a man that died in Auschwitz forty years later. I recommend any of Primo Levi's works for those that truly wish to know sadness.

[Gregory · Rating 2 out of 5]

The quotation on the back written by Italo Calvino inspired me to read this short work of poetry from Primo Levi: "One of the most important and gifted writers of our time." I'm fairly certain Calvino never read this particular collection, however.

[Reg Howard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bleak, very bleak! Hard to rate as at one level some of the poems are so bleak as to be almost inaccessible, while at another Levi's ability to draw parallels with, and extrapolations from, seemingly unconnected experiences or phenomena is startling.

[Andrew Epperson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a big poetry reader, but this was a quick, easy read. I enjoyed navigating Levi’s mindset from his time immediately after Nazi captivity to old age. His musings about death seemed to take on the same themes throughout.

[Perlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow.
I was so taken aback by these poems, but Levi's use of language, his imagery, the surprise at the end. I can only imagine they are even more powerful in Italian.

[Rhys · Rating 3 out of 5]

An excellent volume of poems. It contains two slender collections, which is all the poetry that Primo Levi wrote. I know this author best for his speculative short stories, those strange and ingenious pieces that strongly resemble much of the work of Italo Calvino. These poems have quite a different character but they are all superb. Indeed, there is hardly a weak poem in these pages. Many are sombre, a few are lighthearted (the poem 'Old Mole' is one of my favourite ever animal poems) and some are a combination of dark and wistful. There are powerful poems based on reflections, meditations, observations, Most are fully comprehensible and yet capable of many interpretations, a few still remain cryptic to me (though affecting). An outstanding poetry book.

[B November · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a poet, Primo Levi deserves a lot more praise!