| The Auschwitz
Poems (1986)
Winner of the 1987 Victorian Premier's C.J. Dennis
Prize for Poetry as well as the 1987 NSW Premier's Award
for Poetry.
“The poems are something quite amazing … intensely
wrought, artistically, yet pure and direct and real
and life-size.”
Ted Hughes
Lily Brett’s Auschwitz poems
distil the horror that her parents survived. Quietly
and simply, the poems catalog the everyday details
of life on the brink of death. Their affirmation of
the daily miracle that is survival gives these poems
an intense and haunting power.
The poems move backwards from Auschwitz
into pre-war memory, and forwards to the present.
Lily Brett’s
discovery of her parents’ experience is also,
in the end, a poignant self-discover: for as Auschwitz
has scarred its survivors for the rest of their days,
so too it leaves its mark on the survivors’ children. |
