About the Author:
Charles Ades Fishman directs the Distinguished Speakers Program at Farmingdale State University. He created the Visiting Writers Program at Farmingdale State in 1979 and served as director until 1997. He also co-founded the Long Island Poetry Collective (1973) and was a founding editor of Xanadu magazine and Pleasure Dome Press (1975). He was founder and coordinator of the Paumanok Poetry Award competition (1990-97) and series editor for the Water Mark Poets of North America Book Award (1980-83), and he has also served as associate editor of The Drunken Boat and poetry editor of Gaia, Cistercian Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Genocide Studies. Currently, he is poetry editor of New Works Review. In 1995, he received a fellowship in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Fishman's books include The Firewalkers (Avisson Press, 1996), Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (Texas Tech University Press, 1991), and The Death Mazurka (Timberline Press, 1987; reprinted by Texas Tech, 1989), which was listed by the American Library Association as an "Outstanding Book of the Year" (1989) and nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His most recent books are Country of Memory (Uccelli Press) and 5,000 Bells (Cross-Cultural Communications), both 2004. In 2006, he received the Long Island School of Poetry Award from the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association. He lives with his wife, Ellen, near the Great South Bay, on Long Island.
Review:
Though taking place over a half century ago, the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima become as alive as yesterday's rain in Mr. Fishman's able depictions based on the testimony, witness, memory of those with a terrible knowledge and experience. Humanity's brutality is also explored in the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the death of Lorca, and violence in the Holy Land. Grim subjects all. The art is in the telling: a simple declarative tone mixed with vivid imagery; a style of calculation: dare to turn your face and heart away while the poet rivets you with a storyteller's skill. --Iconoclast
Chopin's Piano is not a book for poets and poetry lovers only. This is a book that should be read in schools, in libraries, in museums, and in the sanctuary of our homes. It's a book that should be carried around in the halls of academia; it's a book that should be absorbed carefully and then discussed amongst scholars, teachers, musicians, artists, attorneys, architects, bakers, doctors, inventors; and, let us not forget, the survivors, because this is a book about all of these people from all walks of life who made up the Holocaust victims....This is truly the best book of poetry I have read in years; it is so telling and beautiful. --Mia Jones, editor of Tryst Magazine
The poems in Charles Fishman's newest collection, Chopin's Piano, reflect the poet's fierce determination to look into the eyes of evil. These poems take on the past, facing historical and cultural demons, and thereby dare the reader to do the same....For this reader, Chopin's Piano is an 'offering of refuge' in the landscape of contemporary poetry. It comes wholeheartedly recommended. --Lois Roma-Deeley, The Pedestal Magazine
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