\nby Freddy Frankel<\/p>\n
Ibbetson Street Press<\/a> <\/p>\n I heard Freddy Frankel read some of these poems a few years ago and was taken by their conciseness, by their wit, and by his commitment to pursuing a variety of threads of poetic inquiry from Biblical characters outward. Frankel, now ninetyish, was born in South Africa and emigrated to the United States in 1962. He had a distinguished medical career, and served, before his retirement some years ago, as Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Beth Israel Hospital and as a member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School.<\/p>\n In a charming twist on ecclesiastical interpretation, he has invoked Biblical, and other related, personalities through first person poems each of which conveys a sense, not only of the narrative context, but of the intentional stance of the character involved. They follow more or less in chronological sequence, beginning with Eve (a nice departure), traveling through Jesus, Augustine and Mohammed, and winding down through Spinoza, Herzl and Balfour. The last poem is entitled God<\/em>, appropriately.<\/p>\n Noah<\/strong><\/em>: Hagar<\/em><\/strong>: An erotic poem that distinctively evokes the encounter between Abraham, and Sarah’s handmaid, Hagar, to bear a child in her place. Abraham<\/em><\/strong> opens with a line of puzzlement and beauty – And in Isaac<\/em><\/strong>, at the outset – Joseph<\/em><\/strong>: Solomon<\/em><\/strong> Cyrus<\/em><\/strong> celebrates Cyrus The Great of Persia who liberated the Jews from Babylon and enabled them to return to Jerusalem to build the Second Temple. Quoting passages from The Talmud, it follows: Jesus<\/em><\/strong>: In a very human, first person, account, says – Bishop<\/em><\/strong>: A witty follow-up to Jesus<\/em><\/strong>, this account of one of the members of the conference at Nicaea called by Constantine, includes – Abu Bakr<\/em><\/strong>: In one of the few poems in the collection not written in the first person, a question is raised – Harum-al-Rashid<\/em><\/strong>: In this tribute to the enlightened Abbasid Caliph of the ninth century who ruled over the Golden Age of Islam – Maimonides<\/em><\/strong>: After acknowledging his reverence for Aristotle, Tomas de Torquemada<\/em><\/strong>: As to the notorious director of the Spanish Inquisition – Erasmus<\/em><\/strong>: What a great little summary of a life view – The False Messiah<\/em><\/strong>: In the voice of Shabbetai Zevi, the false messiah of the seventeenth century – Spinoza<\/em><\/strong>: In a beautiful encapsulation of the great seventeenth century philosopher’s view of the world in response to a traditional Jewish upbringing – God<\/em><\/strong>: In this deeply ironic capstone piece to a theologically inspired series of poems, Frankel both admonishes and appeals, miraculously in the voice of the almighty – – BADMan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\nSomerville, MA<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Cover](\"http:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/WrestlingAngels_cover_11.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Freddy](\"http:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/WrestlingAngels_Frankel_portrait_20.jpg\")
<\/a>
\nIt was I slapped pitch upon the ark
\nsqueezed it in the seams between<\/em>
\nbegins this poem and if one puts the emphasis on “I,” the full rhythmic lilt of the lines comes through, creating a sense of the momentum and intentional force behind this singularly moral, but also vulnerable, personality.
\n… It was I who launched
\nthe raven – it got lost, returned worn out<\/em>
\nprecedes the conclusion, again with rhythmic force, almost suggesting the sway of the ark.<\/p>\n![\"Philip](\"http:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/WrestlingAngels_VanDyck_SarahPresentsHagarToAbraham_Louvre_20.jpg\")
<\/a>
“Sarah Presents Hagar As A Second Spouse To Abraham” (1708)
Louvre<\/a>, Paris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\nAbraham takes my hands unschooled
\nin love to brush them with his lips<\/em>
\nThis, like Noah<\/em>, has a pulsating quality that also calls to mind the act it celebrates.
\nI slide my tongue between his teeth<\/em>
\nrecalls that sway, a fulcrum of Ishmael’s conception rocking forth out of the stanzas.<\/p>\n
\nGod of unmasterable instruction<\/em>
\nfollowing with an account of circumcision, but echoing, in the background, with visions of Isaac on the sacrificial altar.<\/p>\n![\"Caravaggio,](\"http:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/WrestlingAngels_Caravaggio_TheSacrificeOfIsaac_1603_23.jpg\")
<\/a>
“The Sacrifice of Isaac” (1603)
Uffizi Gallery<\/a>, Florence<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\nStooped with deadwood
\non my back I climb<\/em>
\nthe sense of dead <\/em>wood prevailing and calling forth fatality, while the sense of exertion and plodding pervade the emphases of metre.
\na mad voice in his head
\nhe stumbles up the rise<\/em>
\nrefers to his father, Abraham – a wonderfully vivid account of his father’s state – a psychiatrically attuned, yet believably childlike, articulation mapped onto the primal myth about unlimited faith<\/p>\n
\nWhile still a boy I cut through
\ndreams, turn their contents
\ninside out, sifted sacred messages.<\/em>
\nhas such a wonderful sway to it, again a great observation by a psychiatrist, but adding to the “turn <\/em>of contents inside out” a sense of “sifting <\/em>sacred messages,” finding within those dreams not only the indications of hopes and fears, but also the germs of great ennoblement.<\/p>\n
\nI am my mother’s metaphor for failure – not
\nthe icon of success that I appear.<\/em>
\nA difficult, though wonderful, way of viewing the great, wise king.
\n… and I tire
\nof striving always to be wise<\/em>
\nhe says, so vivid in his confession. Characterizing his mother, David’s wife Bathsheba, who David stole from his friend Uriah, Solomon says:
\n… She also harps
\non all my foreign wives, their idols…<\/em>
\nBut, of course, like any rebellious son –
\n… The more she
\ncarps the more I decorate my palace and the temple
\nwith royal wives who bring more gold.<\/em>
\nNaturally! And what a great combination of poetic and therapeutic distillations this is. Bathsheba becomes not only the lusciously desirable wife of David but also a carping mother of Solomon. Love it!<\/p>\n![\"King](\"http:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/WrestlingAngels_Cyrus_20.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\n… I sent them home – Jerusalem –
\nto grow their righteous vision…<\/em>
\na sweet and concise tribute to this emperor of worlds who is credited in the Hebrew Bible as a saving grace of Judaism.<\/p>\n
\nI often held them in my hands
\nby speaking riddles<\/em>
\na telling confession of one who acts surprised at the transmutation of his reputation.
\nCenturies beyond my death
\nthey say I am divine…<\/em>
\nwhich provides such an unexpected quality of first person accounting, a bit uncertain, more in keeping with a meek and experimental spirit, so different from the narratives which now serve as the established authorities. A note to the poem indicates that Constantine, the great Christian emperor of Rome, called, four centuries after the death of Jesus, for a conference of bishops to declare Jesus divine, which leads naturally to…<\/p>\n
\nI argued for a virgin birth…<\/em>
\nand
\nAt last we cobbled together a holy ghost,
\nthe Holy Spirit of Father and of Son –<\/em>
\nFinally, with quite a corker –
\n… Ingeniously we
\nsettled God’s paternity suit. <\/em>
\nAnd in a fabulously concise philosophic assessment of the relation between deliberation, myth, communication, and compromised deliberation –
\n… Faith and reason
\nnever meet without finesse, keystone of
\nreligion’s arc – its unsuspected artfulness.<\/em>
\nBut, the poem is gracious, calling that compromised deliberation finesse<\/em>, a beautiful articulation by an adherent who sees the process for what it is while being a full participant in it.<\/p>\n
\nWho should succeed The Prophet?
\nNeither branch of Islam yields…<\/em>
\n– and comments, in reflecting on the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites over the rightful succession to Mohammed –
\n… Silent
\nviolent ambush after ambush spills our
\nblood. For whome, Allah?<\/em><\/p>\n
\nPoems rise up from the page like unicorns<\/em><\/p>\n![\"Moses](\"http:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/WrestlingAngels_Maimonides_23.jpg\")
<\/a>
\nthe champion of eternity: There never was Creation,
\nthere’s no end<\/em>
\nthe great medieval Jewish philosopher reflects on its impact upon Biblical ideas –
\n… I, physician, rabbi – I
\nmourn Eden, the forsaken bride<\/em>
\n – those two “I’s” framing the sense of inclusion and regret, the sense of loss, but succeeding obligation to reconcile the Greek and Hebraic visions, that frame the Maimonidean project.<\/p>\n
\ntorture lies
\nin the palm of my mind<\/em>
\n– And yet, in the poignant capstone of the lyric –
\nMy mother’s mother used to
\nread to me from pages in her rusty Haggadah<\/em>
\n– a sobering reminder that this ecclesiastical mass murderer of Jews came from a converso<\/em>family and had a Jewish grandmother.<\/p>\n![\"Erasmus\"](\"http:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/WrestlingAngels_Erasmus_Holbein_20.jpg\")
<\/a>
\n… I’m tired of wine and wafers,
\nconversations with the monks, puppets
\nwith no valves inside their souls.<\/em>
\n– Don’t you love that convergence of valves<\/em> and souls<\/em>? It’s such an exacting opposition of images of the sort that makes for great poetry. It makes me want to routinely ask people whether they have valved souls<\/em>! And then, in the coda –
\nI’m most content alongside those like me,
\nuncertain, as is God.<\/em>
\n– Great! If anything is ever attributed to God it is usually not uncertainty, but isn’t that a fabulous idea? A reflection on Erasmus’ hovering between Catholoicism and Protestantism, it’s an historically faithful rendition, but caps it with wonderful and appropriate irony.<\/p>\n
\nI’m graceful as the antelope – my
\nbeard is blond, my blue eyes brilliant.
\nThe Sultan’s cast a bronze of me<\/em>
\n– the sweep of the lyric casts a spell, much like the glowing personality it represents, its lilt and sway an intoxicant, a redirection from the critical sensibility which might call its veracity into question. That is left, in part to –
\nDid you not hear the seagulls call:
\nThe wisest man, the world is small!<\/em>
\n– As though the self-besotted protagonist of the poem misread the word “caw” for “call.” The seagulls, after all, really knew, but his own ears were inured to hearing their caw-call.<\/p>\n![\"Baruch](\"http:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/WrestlingAngels_Spinoza_19.jpg\")
<\/a>
\nI hear Him, hear Him in the Waterfall; see Him, see
\nHim in the Dawn; smell him in the Forest. He didn’t,
\ncouldn’t make the Universe. He rode in within it.<\/em>
\n– What a great idea – riding in within it<\/em> – conjoining in its imagery the sense of unity between God and world and the notion of creation not as a bursting forth but an entering in.<\/p>\n
\nI am your greatest blunder<\/em>
\n– he begins – how wonderful – a deeply self-questioning God –
\nI’ve lain through centuries,
\nweeping,
\ndisappointed
\nin your wishing to trade worship
\nfor a bar of gold, the spoils of war,
\nthe lottery, how much more<\/em>
\n– who laments, in subtle rhythms, almost a ditty, the failures of a world to live up to its creation. And how wonderful is the idea of that created God now speaking, reflecting on its own existential dilemma, realizing that an assured existence relies only upon a realization by those –
\nwho made me
\nin your image<\/em>
\n– What a great, contradictory set of ideas, forcing thought to a wild place. And, in the last line of the poem and of the book –
\nYour praise
\nis like bone china chipped to sentiment alone<\/em>
\n– At once a dire reflection on the limits of human capacity to envision the divine, and, at the same time, an expression of hope – that there is such a thing as bone china, that indeed we might not chip it, or learn not to, that we can, through some avenue of understanding and realization, remove our addiction to sentiment and learn to cultivate what one might think of as a poetically honest sense of the divine. <\/p>\n