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Tiferet – 2005

Volume 2

2005

Biannual

Sima Rabinowitz

A young journal — this is just the third issue — Tiferet has the solidity and self-assuredness of a more seasoned publication and its approach to “spiritual literature” is expansive. Take, for example, this poem by Helen Marie Casey, “Loaves and Pears”:

A young journal — this is just the third issue — Tiferet has the solidity and self-assuredness of a more seasoned publication and its approach to “spiritual literature” is expansive. Take, for example, this poem by Helen Marie Casey, “Loaves and Pears”:

I never write father poems
and I don’t often write about God.
I have a father
and I believe there is a God.
I write love poems
certain that words can never envelope love.
I chew memory
and set the bigger seeds aside.
I shape pain
turning it like the pear on the windowsill
in love with the sun.
I shape it, like dough, into a loaf.
I let the poem rise
the one that wants to be about my father.

Casey’s poem is not “typical” of the poetry in Tiferet, because, happily, there is no typical Tiferet poem. There are dense, intellectually inclined poems (G.C. Waldrep), challenging, inventive poems (Benjamin Paloff), clever, edgy poems (J. T. Bebarese), and smart, lyrical poems (Megham Hicky). There are several illuminating essays, including cover artist Dani Antman’s “Sacred Letters,” in which she describes her engagement with the Hebrew alphabet as the inspiration for her work. Her collage, “Aleph,” makes a marvelous cover for the magazine, and her essay is an instructive piece on the artist’s process. The issue contains an eclectic mix of writers (Nahid Rachlin, Rafael Campo, Ruth Knaffo Setton, Hal Sirowitz, D. Nurske, Francine Sterle, Jeffrey Levine, Maria Mazziottie Gillan) with work that is reverent (an essay by Rabbi Lenore Bohm, “On This Very Path I Will Go”), and work which questions the meaning of reverence (which is not to say irreverent). One of my favorite pieces in the magazine is Peter Selgin’s essay “My Locomotive God,” a lovely, lyrical essay about the atheism the writer learned from his father, whose reverence for knowledge and deep attention to the world were, without question, a form of worship. [Tiferet. P.O. Box 659, Peapack, NJ 07977-0659. Single issue $14.95. www.tiferetjournal.com] –Sima Rabinwitz

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