Flashlight and Other Poems

by Judith Thurman

4-7

Genres: Poetry

Library Binding

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Judith Thurman began contributing to The New Yorker in 1987, and became a staff writer in 2000. She writes about fashion, books, and culture. Her subjects have included André Malraux, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Cristóbal Balenciaga.

Thurman is the author of “Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller,” which won the 1983 National Book Award for Non-Fiction, and “Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette,” (1999), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography, and the Salon Book Award for biography. The Dinesen biography served as the basis for Sydney Pollack’s movie “Out of Africa.” A collection of her New Yorker essays, “Cleopatra’s Nose,” was published in 2007.

Thurman lives in New York.

Source: www.newyorker.com/magazine/contributo...‎

Reviews

[Karen Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a delightful, refreshing and warm poetry experience. It reminded me in the span of just thirty minutes some very specific memories from my childhood which I thought were long gone and buried. But who knew that all it took were Judith Thurman's wonderful words to resurface them.

She really has a special way with poetry that makes her poems appear simple enough for children but contain a certain degree of hidden complexity which appeals to adults.
A very nostalgic experience.

It felt like this book was welcoming me home because I finally realized that she is the creator of this poem I copied diligently into my very first diary. I was delighted by the way the poem sounded. I was just a child and I did not know anything about art just yet but this poem moved me in a way I could not explain.
It stirred my heart and made me feel like being a writer was something I wanted to do. I wanted to see the world like she did and understand how she managed to shape the language into something so animated and imaginative.

New Notebook

Lines
in a new notebook
run, even and fine,
like telephone wires
across a snowy landscape.

With wet, black strokes
the alphabet settles between them,
comfortable as a flock of crows.

She incorporates many childhood memories and sensations into her poems. I adored the way she used the language so beautifully to transform everyday moments of childhood into poignant, nostalgic vignettes filled with meaning.

Breaking Through

Forks
of warm rain
loosen the ice on the pond.

Morning
turns in the keyhole,
the dark gives,
it opens.

My seed
is growing.
A little shoot has pushed through the hard shell.

With just a few words, she can conjure up the image of waking up to see the slanted shadows from the fire escape balcony creeping into her room, creating zebra-like stripes on her floor.

Zebra

white sun
black
fire escape,

morning
grazing like a zebra
outside my window.

My favorite poem is "Flashlight" which has a sense of adventure captured through a child's night-time excursion with her flashlight.

Flashlight

My flashlight tugs me
through the dark
like a hound
with a yellow eye,

sniffs
at the edges
of steep places,

paws at moles'
and rabbits' holes,

points its nose where sharp things
lie asleep -

and then it bounds
ahead of me
on home ground.

Overall, it's a lovely collection of poems and the length of the book is just right for a short, enjoyable read.