Judy Kronenfeld Knihy

“Our memory is the only help that is left to them.” Theodor Adorno’s words, the epigraph of Judy Kronenfeld’s poem, “Saving the Dead,” epitomize a central theme of her elegiac, yet life-affirming collection that would prevent memory from drifting “into the dilating voids of space.” GROANING AND SINGING invokes ancestors known and unknown and evokes the stories of parents and wider family in the particularity that demonstrates the truths and gifts of their lives. It evokes communities: the urban lonely, the women, “blotched / and spotted, with our walkers / and canes,” gathered in “Shearly Beloved,” even the sufferers of the “incandescently unimaginable” pain of history—violence, oppression, disease. But also present is the now of gratefulness: for “morning, morning! / commonplace and miraculous,” for sudden joy, “like dripping fistfuls of sequin confetti / flung into the air and hanging for a moment / crackling like fireworks.”

In her fourth book of poems, Judy Kronenfeld re-invokes and searches for her swiftly receding first-generation urban past and the lives of her dead--particularly her working-class immigrant parents--with love, terror, realism, and humor. Childhood memories illuminate puzzles, almost heal, tantalize with mystery. They recast themselves in imagination and dreams: her dead parents play Scrabble in their Bronx kitchen, though neither can spell. Kronenfeld explores vulnerability: not quite belonging to the worlds she rises into, or the America of her adulthood; moments when we cannot ask for what we most need. With precision, wit, and inventive metaphor, she bodies forth the role of attentiveness in love and art, casts a wry eye on the relation of young and old, and on politics and power. She casts a clear, yet not unmoved eye on endings--others', and her own. And sometimes, the ever-present present transcends the flow of time.