The Hoopoe's Crown (review)

A few years ago, I spent the summer living in the town of Os´wie˛cim, a place known to most of the world as Auschwitz. One weekend, I took the bus to nearby Kraków where, in a small English-language bookstore, I found a copy of Jacqueline Osherow's fourth collection of poetry, Dead Men's Praise. Some books work a special magic, not only through their intelligence and technical brilliance, but also through their ability to arrive in a reader's life at just the right moment, when they are most needed. While I may have encountered Osherow's latest collection, The Hoopoe's Crown, under more prosaic circumstances, her wit, erudition, and skillful handling of received forms continue to amaze me. Here, again, Osherow dazzles, proving that she is one of the American masters of terza rima as well as a gifted writer of sonnets, villanelles, and sestinas.

The text opens with a feminist reclaiming of Jewish tradition. In "My Version: Medieval Acrostic," Osherow uses a form of poetry often employed by Jewish mystics to encode her own name, Jacqueline. As is true in much of Osherow's work, the speaker's voice is half-colloquial, half-poetic: "Jealousy? Homage? Longing? Superstition? / All I know is, I want to join those guys." Later she demands, "Let me in, guys—even if I'm wrong." And, to one-up the male poets whom she admires and wishes to emulate, Osherow writes an acrostic whose lines not only spell out their own secret but that also rhyme.

In "Fata Morgana," Osherow's speaker stands in the desert, not far from the Dead Sea. Although her speaker belongs to the modern world, overhearing snatches of Radio Jordan from a passing car, she is preoccupied by thoughts of Lot's wife and the ancient, inherently human desire for knowledge: "Here, there's only salt and bitterness / and as for shade, I would get between / even the most brutal sun and anything; / I can't help it. I need light. I want to see." It is this need "to see" that drives the collection, regardless of whether Osherow sets her poems in the United States, in Europe, or in Israel. The poet is determined to create surprising dialogues, as she does in "Autumn Psalm," where Chinese poet Wang Wei and Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein speak to one another among the rhyming tercets: "The writings of the world's most spoken language / across from one that can barely get a minyan." The sooner such disparate male voices are able to converse with one another, the sooner a female poet might enter the discourse as well.

In the second and third sections of the book, Osherow revisits landscapes where Jews once lived and thrived. She uses the geography of the Diaspora to comment on the importance of establishing new customs, traditions that must include a female perspective. "Ri'e Yazmin," an eleven-page tour de force of terza rima, takes place in Spain and begins with epigraphs by Shmuel HaNagid, the most famous Jew of Moslem Spain, and Federico García Lorca. As with earlier poems, Osherow allows the men to talk first, a Jew to a Christian, but slyly asks, "Do you think they'd mind if, at first, I listen in." The reader should understand that Osherow is having her say, although she appears to remain silent within the drama of the poem.

Still more subversive is a later piece of terza rima, "At the Art Nouveau Synagogue, Rue Pavée," in which Osherow's speaker observes Orthodox men in prayer: "I'm peering through (we women mustn't be seen)." From her bird's-eye view, up in the women's balcony, the speaker regards the congregation with a mixture of criticism and admiration. She is both insider and outsider; as a Jew, she belongs, but as a woman and a Jew who isn't Orthodox, she cannot: "Indeed I'm trespassing / as it is: wearing jeans, my head uncovered. / Probably I shouldn't even sing." It is a hard...