Overview

After we buried our father, the moon came nearest earth's center, resplendent in its wholeness, most expansive night of all other nights, the Shiva Moon. Six nights after Maxine Silverman buried her father, the full moon coincided with the winter solstice and lunar perigee for the first time in 133 years. This juxtaposition of external brightness and personal grief is the core of Shiva Moon, her portrayal of the preparations for her father's death, and the subsequent year mourning him.

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9781934730591

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"""Intimate and meditative, Shiva Moon has the quality of prayer, yet it's also the journal of a harrowing year, filled with mourning, recollection, and a struggle for spiritual equilibrium. With her celebrated gifts for pictorial and lyrical language (leavened here with Hebrew terms), Maxine Silverman enters the darkness of her beloved father's death and seeks a way to accommodate his loss. Everything around her keeps changing: the moon, her garden, her children, even her absent father who grows more vivid with memory. The only constant is the momentous presence of God, glorious but silent. This is a wise, moving book for every reader--and a necessary book for anyone who's known loss."" -- Joan Murray, author, Swimming For The Ark ""Maxine Silverman's new book of poems, Shiva Moon, recounts her life during the year of saying Kaddish for her father. 'Mourning's 30th day/it dawns on me. Without him/is the rest of my life.' The poems, deeply felt, are spare, spoken in a quiet but compelling voice, as if we were listening in to her inner life. This book is a precious record of the transformation saying Kaddish can bring. It deserves to be read. These writings express a profoundly earth-based theology in a language that is clear and comprehensible. These are works to study and learn from."" -- Howard Schwartz, author, Breathing in the Dark and The Library of Dreams Praise for Maxine Silverman: ""a terrific ear for our language... Her mostly longish lines are lush and musical... One does not make that kind of music by accident. Even her syntax is musical (as it should be!). Read her poems, reread them out loud!"" -- Thomas Lux, author, Split Horizon"

Intimate and meditative, Shiva Moon has the quality of prayer, yet it's also the journal of a harrowing year, filled with mourning, recollection, and a struggle for spiritual equilibrium. With her celebrated gifts for pictorial and lyrical language (leavened here with Hebrew terms), Maxine Silverman enters the darkness of her beloved father's death and seeks a way to accommodate his loss. Everything around her keeps changing: the moon, her garden, her children, even her absent father who grows more vivid with memory. The only constant is the momentous presence of God, glorious but silent. This is a wise, moving book for every reader--and a necessary book for anyone who's known loss. -- Joan Murray, author, Swimming For The Ark Maxine Silverman's new book of poems, Shiva Moon, recounts her life during the year of saying Kaddish for her father. 'Mourning's 30th day/it dawns on me. Without him/is the rest of my life.' The poems, deeply felt, are spare, spoken in a quiet but compelling voice, as if we were listening in to her inner life. This book is a precious record of the transformation saying Kaddish can bring. It deserves to be read. These writings express a profoundly earth-based theology in a language that is clear and comprehensible. These are works to study and learn from. -- Howard Schwartz, author, Breathing in the Dark and The Library of Dreams Praise for Maxine Silverman: a terrific ear for our language... Her mostly longish lines are lush and musical... One does not make that kind of music by accident. Even her syntax is musical (as it should be!). Read her poems, reread them out loud! -- Thomas Lux, author, Split Horizon

Author Information

"MAXINE SILVERMAN is the author of Palimpsest and four chapbooks, most recently Transport of the Aim. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, she has published poems and essays in many journals, anthologies, and Enskyment: Online Archive of American Poetry. ""Life List"" is inscribed on granite at Edmands Park in Newton, MA - her most unusual publication thus far."

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