Epiphanies: Poems of liberation, exile and confinement, by Harvey Gillman

Author: Harvey Gillman. Review by James Gordon

Some readers will know that Harvey Gillman, much-respected author and speaker, has always been a poet.

Before Quaker convincement, growing up as a working-class Jewish boy, he was spiritually apprenticed to a rabbi (as told in the humorous but touching poem ‘Der Rebbe’). After some angry fist-shaking atheism, he took his Jewish faith seriously enough to throw open its windows, and find some semblance of God out on the streets and in the countryside, movingly described in ‘Visitations from Childhood’.

His longer poem ‘Passover’, written during lockdown, catches the ideal distance from his Jewish roots, which he is close enough, and warm enough about, to censure (‘You are not a people apart… You carried your Egypt branded upon you. How then shall you sing?’). These witnessings of ‘truth to power’ are always courteously delivered.

The whole collection, veering between heaven and earth, has the status and stature of prophecy. Its pinnacles are a number of ‘weighty’ poems, always light of touch (as in ‘Zooming for Worship’: ‘We come with heart and mind and device prepared. We click. We wait.’). Here are testimonies against racism and homophobia (‘Colours of the Rainbow’ is a strikingly-original variation on a familiar metaphor), both targeted in a section called ‘Pilgrimage and Retreat’, where we also find ‘Walsingham’, named for the Norfolk shrine whose star Harvey addresses by her true name, Miriam. He probes stereotypes: ‘And for a moment / I stand before you to garland your black Jewish hair: / with this makeshift rosary of pain and love.’ I grew up Catholic and my only pilgrimage was to Walsingham. If only I could then have had such a poem to guide me.

More secular poems bespeak a spiritual depth. I especially loved ‘Instructions for Survival’ which should be issued to black kids, gay men, and all women on our streets: ‘When you go out, carry ID – you have to prove who you are.’ The last word must go to the dazzling display of forty-five haikus, of which Harvey proves himself a master. I draw at random: ‘We have waited long / by the gate called beautiful. / Light pours from the cracks.’

This poetry is neither obscure nor banal. Decisively contemporary, it uses flowing, free verse. Image and symbol are deployed to natural, sometimes startling effect. In ‘Ill in Cherbourg’, the smack of the moment is for ever recalled: ‘the sun melts brilliantly into pools of rain. / Through the windows, the clatter of midday plates.’

Recommended to all, Friends or no; especially for those protesting they’ve no time for poetry. Perhaps them especially.

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