shabbtai.com
Poetry/Prose
Where would we be without poetry? No pop songs, no limericks, no playing with rhyme. Imagine Churchill without Shakespeare, the Beatles without Christopher Marlowe. And though, as Auden put it, “poetry makes nothing happen, it is a way of happening, a mouth.”
My poems have some recurring themes: gay male love, Jewish complexities, the long reach of the Hebrew Bible. They have even woven themselves into my book of poems written to and for my grandson. Looking back, as we are wont to do on all our experience, these poems also console, a small accomplishment of sorts. Because they seek to offer solace they are written in a narrative style. Their target audience is the average literate reader. No struggle is required, no grappling with dangling modifiers and sentences that end in midstream. The words are put to the simple task of recording, touching, illuminating our lives.
My first collection, Half A Shekel, was written over a period of years prior to 2005. The second collection, The Joshua Poems, covers the years 2005-2010 when I took care of my grandson during the first five years of his life. The third and most recent collection, Now, Looking Back, was composed in the years 2014 to 2016. Since then I have written more, a collection of three long poems and a collection in Hebrew. I am still looking to publish them somewhere.
Clicking on each title will bring you to a page which describes the book and contains sample poems from the collection. If you like what you read, rest assured you will like the book. If you are intrigued by what you read, take a chance and order the book.
I also do a one hour recital of English poetry from Christopher Marlowe to Dylan Thomas suitable for audiences of high-school age and up. Use the contact page to ask me about it. Of course it would also please me no end to read my own poetry to you.