Poetic Voices: Rachel Heimowitz and J.L. Jacobs

     

We are all from a place. It may be a place we’ve lived all of our lives; it may be a place where we grew up. It may be a place we visited and instantly felt at home. And it may be a place that we’ve never set foot in, yet exists in our minds as something intensely real, which is what good literature can often do.

I was a teenager when I read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, and Paris became a place of both fascination and fear. When I actually visited the city in 1999, I experienced both fascination and fear, although the fear has less to do with the mob and the guillotine than with pickpockets and the rather thuggish-looking character who followed us from the Metro to the Victor Hugo House in the Marais.

Our sense of place is powerful.

Two poets recently dealt with the sense of place in their collections, one describing life in a very specific place – contemporary Israel – while the other draws upon the places of both childhood and imagination (including, coincidentally, the Holy Land).

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.