Backstage Lights: Poems

Each of the poems in this book is an expression of a personal encounter with a teaching by Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook (1865-1935), Torah leader, scholar, mystic and philosopher. Cynthia Ozick wrote of my "Little Psalms": "I so much liked your perfect Little Psalms, some of them so much in the spirit (and often the language-of-feeling) of Yiddish poetry. You've created a fine amalgam of the American tongue and its sensibilities, and your new/old yeshiva explorations." David Sears (head of the Breslov Center) said of my "Airport Lights": "Yaacov David Shulman has created a number of important translations of both contemporary and classic Jewish scholarly works, especially his translations from Rav Kook and Rabbi Nachman, for which his readers are rightfully grateful (myself among them). But with this collection of his original poems, he expresses his personal spiritual vision. He does so with a keen sensitivity to language and sometimes startling juxtapositions of images, coupled with a surrealist's evocation of the wonders of the everyday. One of the great Chasidic masters recalled that in the court of the Maggid of Mezeritch, there were "miracles piled up under the benches, but we couldn't bother to pick them up!" I'm glad that Yaacov David Shulman has bothered to do so in his spiritual travels, and made them into poems."

Author: Yaacov Shulman

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Publication Date: Apr 04, 2018

Number of Pages: 123 pages

Language: English

Binding: Paperback

ISBN-10: 1987473442

ISBN-13: 9781987473445