Böcker av Helen Kanevsky

Poems in Bringing the Light are full of thoughts and ideas about the world workings as applied to a human soul. This is about how we handle our memories and our past and where is our place in the universe. The author has a surprisingly unexpected worldview, and some poems could even teach us a little. It is the poetry of direct address, with the discourses that are enlivened, more than ever, by unpredictable lines of approach-departure and by an uncanny sense of language's expressive possibilities.

Fate Revised is a fourth book of poems by Helen Kanevsky. The book contains 67 poems written in 2019-2020. It is a fast-paced collection from a restless and probing mind. Her style builds on short lines, observations that are by turns comic, rueful, and acerbic; and distinctive images from both the natural and the social world. Fate, the inevitable, is being revised and not just in the telling. There is real drama in these poems. In Helen''s poetry one gets caught up in a kaleidoscope of words, jostled by the metaphors tumbling into each other, colliding and sending sparks, which ignite a brush fire of dispassionate or sarcastic or fatalistic or hedonistic or self-deprecating, or slyly playful imagery - the poetic equivalent of riding a roller coaster. One can get giddy from the fast-moving views to get off satisfied that the ride has given their neurons a good run. You can always rest afterward, if you get too dizzy.

Helen Kanevsky dismantles the separation between fact and fiction in her new poetry collection that enlightens with imagery but also delves into literal truth.Life, the endless reverse from which Helen Kanevsky draws her bitter-sweet poetic brew, is just too weird to grasp and maybe not worth grasping ("Life violates every code of decency"). It is "Rabbis in kimonos munching on gefilte fish sushi." It is an entity that, when you think you've found the particles from which it is constructed, turned into a wave and scatters - its meaning ever elusive, and fading into old recollections. And yet, there is that reality that must be connected with sobriety. As the poet says, "Memories are useless ballast ... until you are brought in for questioning." Reality in Helen's poems defies exactitude, best captured not by exciting exposition, but in the Kanevsky-esque disquisition. And, it is FUN! Bruce Neuburger, writer, educator, and peace activist

Caged Time is a fast-paced poetical narrative, an intricate blend of reality and fantasies, a trek down a path of sober magical realism. Caged Time reflects on fate, survival in a hostile world, the unforgiving compliments of age, death, a warning to future generations! Caged Time is rooted in the real events and fantasy, confessions and imagination but when you start to read you'll be wont to stop for a while, look back at your life and see how your reflective memory and Helen's observations intertwine. But be careful. You may find the author's mood and unusual turns of phrase, rubbing off on you.