The triumph of "Home"

A wonderfully perceptive review for my poetry book, Home:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read "Home" and be the better for it., August 10, 2014

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Amazon Customer "lokhos" (USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Home (Kindle Edition)

Uvi Poznansky had a father, like most of us; a family, as most of us do for a time. But this father was a gifted writer, as his daughter is gifted. This book is partly written by Uvi's father, Zeev Kachel, and partly by her own deep heart. This is no book for the faint of heart, nor a book to read casually. This book is full of love and pathos and grief. So take a deep gulp of the human condition, and read Home -- a book, a compilation, a struggle of the self.

This book is about emotion and the strength that sadness can evoke in the best of us. Uvi understands at a gut level the purpose of art and here she writes a frame around her father's journey, which has inspired her own.

Poznansky gives us a glimpse of lives most different, of her father's journey, of her own. If you've disdained the search for a higher octave of writing on Kindle, recant: "Home" proves you wrong. In this book, the author shows us the world through an unblinking eye. And what we see, we may not like: humanity torn open, a father lost, life among the ruins of a single soul.

Be warned: this book is dark; it must be to take us where it wants to go, to guide us through a storm of feeling. Zeev Kachel's numerous poems in "Home" share his loneliness, his talent -- and hers as she writes, evoking a spirit from beyond life's end.

I have well reviewed Uvi Poznansky before, but this book is special, even for a writer as gifted as she. Of her father, I knew nothing. Now I know more. And I am certain that talent is inheritable: we must thank the father for the daughter, and the daughter for writing a book this brave. The poems and stories here take us through war and displacement and despair, and back again. Its visions (not so much about horror directly, but about what horrors and inhumanity do to us all, soul by soul) have a message for us, about what humanity can be, for better and for worse. Why do we care? Because, if we're not vigilant, these things will happen again to more fathers, to more daughters. And again. And it is the single voices which cry out in misery (those who have lost their faith as well as those who regain it), whose words we need to hear. This book takes us on a personal journey, not a political one, into the heart of our kind.

The triumph of "Home" is that it was ever written at all.

Read "Home" and be the better for it.