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    For the Old Country: Selected Poems
    For the Old Country: Selected Poems
    For the Old Country: Selected Poems
    Ebook146 pages44 minutes

    For the Old Country: Selected Poems

    By Richard Schwartz

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    About this ebook

    For the Old Country is the debut collection of poems from Richard Schwartz. These playful, witty and ironic poems are a unique record of a personal, tribal, political and above all global author. The collection explores a range of themes across a variety of settings. The poems straddle worlds, both real and lost, with settings in Zimbabwe, Hackney and the lost spaces of Jewish Europe. 
    This book also visits lost worlds including Rhodesia, the shtetl and childhood. Poems about age, death, love and yearning reveal Richard’s experience as he identifies the world of intellect with a Talmudic love of testing sacred notions. He encourages readers to consider identity, doubt, politics and God with thought-provoking and profound writing. In essence a book of moving reports from the front line of a life examined, For the Old Country will appeal to fans of poetry, especially readers with questions about identity and beliefs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTroubador Publishing Ltd
    Release dateJan 28, 2018
    ISBN9781788034012
    For the Old Country: Selected Poems

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      Book preview

      For the Old Country - Richard Schwartz

      For the old country

      Selected poems

      Richard Schwartz

      Copyright © 2018 Richard Schwartz

      The moral right of the author has been asserted.

      Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

      Matador

      9 Priory Business Park,

      Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

      Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

      Tel: 0116 279 2299

      Email: books@troubador.co.uk

      Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

      Twitter: @matadorbooks

      ISBN 978 1788034 012

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

      For Lisa, Ethan and Eliana
      He [Rabbi Hillel] used to say: If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?
      Ethics of the Fathers, 1:14

      Contents

      Not that Richard Schwartz

      Against time

      All the touches you’ve resisted

      1921–1995

      Drought

      Lips (Haiku)

      Things you should be able to talk about without politics intruding

      Age plays tricks

      Anyway, we left

      As long as you’re active, that’s the main thing

      As you were

      Athinas Street

      Atonement

      Bees of Hokkaido, Bees of Aleppo

      Before signing off from work

      Boundaries

      Bowls

      Bridges

      B.Y.O.

      Cat got your tongue?

      Chapter XVI: The secret of life

      Closure be damned

      Cochineal

      Crossroads I

      Crossroads II

      Directions

      Dismal science haiku

      Do the old songs

      Don’t get me wrong

      Drasha

      Dress rehearsal

      Echoes

      Elvis has left the building

      Emergency coffee

      Equal opportunities

      Family weekend

      My part in the Zimbabwean film industry

      First thoughts

      Five blue doors

      For the old country

      Fourth commandment

      Funeral haiku

      Good fences make good neighbours…

      Delices de France

      Gwelo 40 miles (1)

      Gwelo 40 miles (2)

      Hard talk

      Hard to prepare

      He chose the grass carefully

      Urban Summer

      How often we return

      How to get started

      Stuck

      On behalf of a friend

      If I were the world

      In honour of National Limerick Day

      In spite of all we know

      It

      It’s shit getting old

      Just before all hell broke loose

      Late

      Laurus nobilis

      Lost for words

      Marc and Ida in 1923

      Memory jar

      Minerva

      News poem (almost found)

      Nothing left out

      Now and then

      Old bones

      On the road

      On trying to knuckle down

      On trying to knuckle down II

      Once I believed

      One or two things about siblings

      Our earth is full

      Outside

      # Perfect sense

      Personally,

      Philip Richard Zinn

      Physics, chemistry and biology

      Priorities

      Protocols of the Youngers of Zim

      Radio silence

      Reckoning

      Room to move

      Routes

      Seeing double haiku

      Self-help

      Signature tune

      So that’s what happened to me!

      Solstice

      Somewhere near my destination

      Spirit level

      St Paul’s Yard, Hackney

      Sucker for sunlight through leaves

      Sudden death

      Thank you for the days

      That’s how it was in those days

      The day before the funeral

      The goat in the machine

      The herring gull

      The national lottery

      The truth of the matter

      The Victory Tree

      They

      Things I don’t do in the morning

      Things I leant at Avondale Junior School that have been archived deep in the brain’s basement and are gathering dust, but of which there is still a record

      This evening at the bus stop

      This is how it is

      Today has jumped the starting gun

      Today in History

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