Published by The Puddin’head Press
Perfect Bound, 83 pages
8.5 x 8.5 inches, 2009
ISBN# 978-0-9119756-0-3
$15.00
Praise for Habry
Helen Degen Cohen’s remarkable poetic memoir re-enters the mind of the child, who understands nothing and accepts everything, for whom experience consists of discrete, often luminous, images. There is a floating, Chagall-like qulaity about many of these deeply moving poems. – Lisel Mueller
What strikes me in Helen Degen Cohen’s poetry is how the leaden material of history is lifted and made to soar by the vitality of the poet’s imagination – sometimes surreal, sometimes witty, sometimes merely glorious. – Alicia Ostiker
…a voice of authority mixed with childlike innocence, a voice isolated from norms, both engendered by and expressing a state of innocence as well as knowledge. Its power is immense… – Lucia Getsi
About Helen Degen Cohen
Helen Degen Cohen was born Halina Degenfisz in a small town near Warsaw. When the Germans invaded, the family fled to White Russia, but were eventually incarcerated in the Ghetto by the advancing Germans. Because the Ghetto population was shrinking due to the Selections (people being marched into a field, weeded out and shot), Helen’s father found a way of getting the family out of the Ghetto, to live in the little prison where he worked. When finally all remaining Jews were to be exported, and the family stood at the train station waiting to board, her mother gave Helen a cup and told her to pretend to be going for water at a pump, and to keep on walking – until she found the house of the prison cook. The cook found a devout Catholic, who hid Helen in a cabin in the farm country. Meanwhile, Helen’s parents later jumped from the train and joined the Resistance. They found Helen after the war, made it to a Displaced Persons Camp in West Germany, and later emigrated to the U.S. Since then, the author has lived and raised a family in the Chicago area.
Helen Degen Cohen is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, an Indiana Writers’ Conference Award in Poetry, First Prize in British Stand Magazine’s International Short Story Competition, three Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards for fiction and poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. Her work is the subject of scholarly essays, including: “Rootlessness and Alienation in the Poetry of Helen Degen Cohen”, by Miriam Dean-Notting (Kenyon College), in Shofar (University of Nebraska Press) and “This Dark Poland – Ethnicity in the work of Helen Degen Cohen”, by John Guzlowski, in Something of My Very Own To Say: American Woman Writers of Polish Descent (Columbia University Press). She has received fellowships to majors arts colonies in the U.S., including Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center For Creative Arts, and Ragdale. She was the featured poet twice in the Spoon River Poetry Review.
Seven sections of her autobiographical novel, The Edge of the Field, have been published to date, the latest in 2009 in “Where We Find Ourselves”, an anthology by SUNY. One section received first prize in Stand Magazine’s International Competition (England), and another received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award. Her chapbook “On A Good Day One Discovers Another Poet” was published in 2009. Ms Cohen publishes widely in literary journals such as The Partisan Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Minnesota Review, Cream City, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Versal (Holland), Stand Magazine (England), The Antigonish Review (Canda), Akcent (Poland), and Nimrod. She is a founding editor of the poetry journal, Rhino.
Contents
The End of Snow
The Chorus… Variations On A Theme
Snow Is Falling On The Underground
The War
The Star In The Window Is Yellow
Lord, There Is Something
Ruda Felka
And The Snow Kept Falling
That dark golden Jewish light
I have been lost in an image forest
A View From The Ghetto
So Many Parades, Mirenka
Glass Beaded Rings
Light
The Prison As A Gray Box
Balalaika
Joseph’s Ark
And The Airplanes Fly
The Trains
In Hiding
Haloes
Joseph On The Night Of Nights
The Village Girl’s Dream
Habry
I remember coming into Warsaw, a child
The Children of War Smile And Are Happy
Sing Illinois
The War Gave Birth To Me
My Mother’s Roots
There Are Men
Drifting Towards You, Malina
Among The Unsurvived
Retirement Village
People Look In
My Mother’s Dishes
When You Finally Marry
How You Saved My Life
To Keep My Mother Happy
The Faces, Up There
It’s been centuries
The Return Of Rhyme
She looked among her friends
The Writer
Survivors
This Morning
The Woman With Many Lines
Exerpt
The Chorus… Variations On A Theme
A survivor walks among the war hungry
It smelled so good to him, he came closer,
asked questions, licked at the images,
felt his blood, went hunting in my neighborhood for more—
I live among those deprived of war,
the blunted workaday ones
who would never think of planting a garden.
Once I met someone so jealous that he went there.
Only no one knew him, it wasn’t the same.
He had gotten so dressed up for the occasion,
wearing his best coffins, so to speak
and no one knew his name, poor man.
No one even knew he was there.
He wants my ghost to introduce him.
While we who were there dance and dance
and plant roses and petunias.
He looks on, silent and dim.
And we feel so sorry for his peaceful kingdom
but then this chorus begins, all of itself….
Snow Is Falling On The Underground
For Joseph and Bella in the Underground
These are biblical times.
You move with the crowd
you have to move with the crowd.
Snow is falling on the horse’s head
into his great dead eyes,
falling as they sit gathered together,
in the country of white thanksgiving,
as they watch the body divided
and thrown to the doglike
hunger of the dwindling,
weakening crowd. And the birds overhead
and the child staring at the horse’s head
take with them the odor of blood,
the whiteness of snow.
When they saw the horse coming,
led by the forerunners, the scouts,
to some he looked like a god,
while others waited, cold
as kings and queens, frozen
to their chore of receiving.
Yes he said unto them
out of his flat, snowed-over eyes,
I am neither deaf nor dumb nor blind
but I can’t understand you,
I am made differently—
and snow kept falling
on their hands, their thighs,
as they cut him up, as they ate,
those who could neither choose nor be chosen,
but moved, just ahead of the enemy behind them
and the bombs descending from
the holiest aspects of height,
like the snow—
it was too cold to wonder about it,
though the wonder lives on.
They ate the horse.
The child whimpered.
And the snow kept falling.
Even into the holes
they had dug for hiding.
To the very far and wide
circumference beyond the world,
which must be the end of the war.
It was as if someone were singing
the same daily song
out of the same buried songbook:
These are biblical times,
this is winter beginning,
these are the days of the
vanishing horses.
Visit Habry on Facebook.
Other books by The Puddin’head Press.
View our complete catalog.