Reviews
“Never Expected! Always Fresh” by Bruce Whiteman The Hudson Review Summer 2022
[A] cultural responsibility that seems to have fallen to the poets in an age in which literacy sometimes seems as old-fashioned as the astrolabe is to keep alive and in use the vocabulary that exists beyond the usual wan and skinny word-hoard of most people, even readers. Judith Baumel, in her new collection entitled Thorny,[2] sent me to the dictionary more than a few times to look up words such as scoriae (slag, cinders), barbicels (small hooks on a bird’s feather), and eyeass (a falcon nestling), while fornacic, which I could find nowhere, I could scry from its Latin root (“fornix,” meaning an oven or kiln). These unusual words, as they should be in poems, are always just the right word for the moment and are never called on for mere show, though Baumel can occasionally imitate Wallace Stevens playing the role of what Siegfried Sassoon once called an “advanced vocabularian.” Here is the short opening stanza of a poem she indicates arose from “Reading W.E.B. Du Bois and Wallace Stevens”:
Hereditary Bondsmen! Barbicels,
sickle, saddle hackle, furbelow,
the feathers of a great and noisy turbit roost.
This concatenation of feathers, flounces, and fly-tying, beginning with a pair of words borrowed from Byron by way of W. E. B. Du Bois writing about Booker T. Washington (the Hereditary Bondsmen bit) creates a joyful noise indeed, something almost as boisterous as a dovecote where turbits (a breed of pigeon) are kept. Read full review here.
“The Flavor Blooms in Warmth: On Judith Baumel’s Thorny” by Rachel Hadas Los Angeles Review of Books July 6, 2022
The poems in Judith Baumel’s Thorny revolve around or return to four points of reference: her family/ancestors; her love of Italy; her Bronx neighborhood and, beyond that, New York City; and pastoral poems from Mediterranean antiquity, notably by Theocritus and Virgil. These preoccupations naturally overlap. When shepherd-poets Tityrus and Meliboeus trade memories, geography and war, times and places elegantly dovetail, chiming in the nuanced pastoral call and response of Virgil’s Eclogues or Theocritus’s Idylls (“After the Battle of Long Island, the Battle of Fell’s Point”). Memories of Baumel’s forebears inevitably open up references to the Holocaust. Passeggiata is a key trope for this poet; a stroll in Palermo, “ice cream sandwich / in hand,” reveals history’s palimpsest: “the three alphabets of via Calderai / — Italian, Hebrew, Arabic …” (“Passeggiata and Memory in Palermo.”) Nothing is separate, nothing is fenced off from anything else, either in the stratified topography of cities or in the poet’s vision. Read full review here.
Review of Thorny from Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene by Ruth Hoberman.
Recently I’ve been thinking about land acknowledgments—those statements that precede many poetry events these days, recognizing our complicity in the violent confiscation of the land we stand on. Judith Baumel’s recent collection Thorny, while not overtly political, performs some of the same work—complicating our sense of who we are by insisting on the layers beneath. Thorny is thorny in the best ways: tangled, resistant, resilient, complex, deeply rooted in landscape and its histories.
“Passeggiate,” the book’s first section, is set mainly in Italy—the place Baumel describes in interviews as her “happy spot,” and where she taught as a Fulbright scholar. “Passeggiate” is Italian for “stroll”: the poems suggest the rewards of walking, looking, absorbing; but each at some point also digs beneath the moment into the past. In “Hic Adelfia Clarissima Femina,” for example, a contemporary observer describes the elaborately carved sarcophagus of Adelfia, at Syracuse: “I want to look this way and be looked at this way,” she says, of the husband and wife carved into a fluted shell at the sarcophagus’s center.
The variety of ideas and forms filling the book makes it seem that Baumel is capable of doing anything, and of doing it with virtuosity and wit.
– Jake Marmer The Jewish Daily Forward
Judith Baumel's new poems are inspiring cabinets, loaded with gorgeous sounds, startling juxtapositions, and emotionally intricate quests. Sophisticated and subtle prosodic effects find their match in the poet's intellectual alertness, her endearing inquisitiveness: her carefully modulated lines bend, hurry, linger, exult, and effloresce, with idiomatic inventiveness and grace. The Kangaroo Girl is an important achievement by a remarkable poet.
– Wayne Koestenbaum
I love Baumel’s poems, their restless bravura intelligence, their verbal pyrotechnics leavened with sorrow and the wisdom they’ve earned in sorrow. Kangaroo Girl is interested in everything historical, from the medieval persecution of the Jews to the toys of technology, to the stories of our bodies. She charts the inexorable changes that choose us, and those we choose.
– Gail Mazur, author Figures in a Landscape
Readers of Judith Baumel's poems know to expect a perfectly-heard line, a self -deprecating charm and indulgent wit that can turn the smallest occasion into a matter of weight, a blend of strong intelligence and sheer friendliness. But throughout The Kangaroo Girl, and especially in its last third, they will also find the collision of a new silence and a new intensity. This is Baumel's best work yet.
– James Richardson
Judith Baumel writes fierce and delicate meditations, combining an intimate personal lyricism with a broadly historical vision. This is a wondrously moving, rousing, and often very beautiful book.
– April Bernard
“The passionate and personal poems in Now, Judith Baumel’s second collection, often unfold in long sentences that picture the world in sometimes harsh detail. But if they reflect an essentially troubled view of life, they also articulate a readiness to be astonished by beauty and heartened by love.”
—Jonathan Aaron, The Boston Globe
“Judith Baumel’s intelligent and beautifully made poems bear witness to the dense interconnectedness of things. Baumel somehow manages to be a mistress of metaphor, a plain-spoken observer, and a meditative poet at the same time. In her work, each lived moment Now is more than just itself; rather, travel friendship, family, art, death, history, cities are all enriched with antecedent and echoes, not to mention vivid imagery. I always look forward to this poet’s work.”
—Rachel Hadas
“Judith Baumel is one of the most gifted younger poets writing in this country. I think Now is a tough and impressive work of art and I like the way that it is ferocious and tender and plainspoken and much more artful than it looks.”
—Robert Hass
“Unlike much of contemporary poetry, Baumel’s meditative poems succeed in moving beyond the self without becoming either unbearably politically correct, or hopelessly mired in grandiosity and pretension… The poet Mary Karr once said that poetry’s aim is ‘to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.’ Baumel triumphs on both counts as she makes an uneasy truce with a world she finds impossible to accept.”
—Robert McDowell in The Hudson Review
“No more than Auden is she embarrassed by thought, freshly formulated statement, which erupts from her imagery with considerable force. Yet all this diversity is under the control of a consistent sensibility—one can hear the personal note throughout the book. The richness of her language identifies the richly emerging poet, as does a love poem (“Roche Moutonnees”) shoes impact comes from the poet’s celebration of the transforming power of metaphor. For the delight of a reader of many first-book manuscripts, and surely for the pleasure of her readers-to-come, along with her talent and skill she has an interesting mind.”
—From the citation by Mona Van Duyn
“In her exact, impassioned poems Judith Baumel gives us, again and again, full weight and full measure. I’m grateful for the unstinting pleasures of this wonderful book.”
—William Matthews
“The weight of numbers has a proper gravity to it: the seriousness of its subjects and of its attention. But the poems also accelerate with surprises (imagine Jane Austen at the Roman baths!) and a rhythmic buoyancy. The reader is carried confidently along. Baumel never loses her balance.”
— J. D. McClatchy
“Thorny, is a book filled with leisurely, sensorial strolls—passeggiate—through European and American landscapes, through the ruined geographies of the Shoah, and through the more private terrains of family history. By traveling the footpaths of the past, these poems “bring distant ghosts / forward to the spilled circle.” In “Pale Stars,” a speaker describes drinking whiskey from glasses that once held the wax of Yarzheit candles, an experience that stirs memory with grief but also a dash of subversive pleasure. And this is the book’s power, how even as it elegizes “those who are gone,” Thorny takes in the sights and scents and flavors of the right-now, past and present mixing provocatively together, the future walking somewhere on the street ahead of us.”
— Jehanne Dubrow, author of Wild Kingdom and Taste: A Book of Small Bites.
“Here is a book by a poet unafraid to mine the “brutal business” of death and the “generous rot” of life. In Thorny, Judith Baumel lets herself roam and ruminate through the book’s many subjects—loss, history, memory. Though common domain in poetry, Baumel has an uncommonly keen attention to the world and to the world of language. Multi-directional, polyvocal, erudite, daring, and sly—these poems are the yield of a life both well-observed and deeply felt. The book begins with an urgent declaration: “I want to look this way and be looked at this way.”
— Jan-Henry Grey, author of Documents.
“Judith Baumel deftly braids the classic and the demotic, family heritage and happenstance, both in reference and in idiom. Her way of probing her settings and subjects calls on the striking idiosyncrasies of naming and points us toward origins. The language is always engaged. Strong, sometimes dark, moods pass through these pages, but there are also beakers full of the warm south.”
— Sven Birkerts, author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age.
Home and Abroad by Drew Swinger
Begin with the title of Judith Baumel’s new chapbook of poems, Passeggiate. An Italian term that makes occasional inroads into English, it refers to the custom in Italy of taking leisurely evening strolls in piazzas and along thoroughfares, where family and friends congregate before dinner to see and be seen and to catch up with the latest news and gossip. It is a ritual both public and intimate. For Baumel, who herself has lived in Italy as a Fulbright scholar and resident of the Civita Institute, passeggiate may begin in these literal strolls and encounters with locals and their culture, but they end in more troubled and farther-flung connections.
Kangaroo Girl, reviewed by Joyce Peseroff
I’ve often felt that books by Judith Baumel have been too few and too far between. She won the Walt Whitman award for her first, The Weight of Numbers, in 1987. Now arrived eight years later, and her third book, The Kangaroo Girl, was published in 2011. So I was excited to see Passeggiate listed among Arrowsmith’s latest titles,and happier still to have this beautifully designed chapbook in hand. In her fourth collection, Baumel’s signature mix of gravity and brio approaches new territory as she finds—no, constructs—a fresh language for life’s sweets and sours. Identity and history, New York and Italy, and Baumel’s sensuous feel for words remain continuing pleasures as Passeggiate goes even deeper into the well that her poems draw from.