Katherine Hollander

Published March 26, 2019

anthony-hecth-prize-logo-14thkatherine_hollander_175Winner of the 14th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize

Judge: Charles Wright

Two poems from Katherine Hollander’s My German Dictionary

followed by a note on the author

 

Confession (Invitation)

I couldn’t be a good Jew, so I tried
to be a good historian. I couldn’t be
a good historian, so I wrote poems.

I couldn’t write about the Shoah, so
I wrote about the Somme. My heart
is not a pocket watch. I wrote swans

snails, stars, and mud. I couldn’t sleep,
so I tried sleepwalking. I couldn’t
sleepwalk, so I just dreamed. Oh

doctor-father, oak-owl, grandfather clock:
Why didn’t you help godpapa? Why didn’t you help
me? Nuremburg, Nuremburg, my old hometown.

Tell me, however should I find such a country?
I didn’t love a nation, I loved an idea.
I don’t trust policemen, I don’t look

at stray dogs, I don’t trust clocks. I am
unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The good
traveling coat has a fox-fur collar

and a fat gold tassel at the shoulder.
Pull on it, and out from the wide sleeve, a little
cedar ladder nudges ready to take you away.

 

Katherine Hollander

 

Immer

No city can compete
with this city, capital
of ghastliness, beauty,
and dawn. White sky,
the streetlamps turning
out like diamonds
going dark. A wet kitten
drinks milk on a windowsill.
The drowned girl makes her long way
down the river, under bridges.
Her eyes are looking at
the moon. To her fingers
come the fish, like swallows.
The night’s bodies tend
morgueward. A war-hero,
legless, sharpens pencils
readied like a clutch of arrows.
Mothers are ironing. Children
are sleeping in rooms papered
with money, patterns of leader-
faces, wheat-sheaves and stars.
The sun is rising. The street
cleaner comes, as ever.

Katherine Hollander

 

Katherine Hollander is a poet and historian. Her poetry, criticism, and scholarship have appeared in Literary Imagination, Pleiades, Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, The Brecht Yearbook, New German Critique, and elsewhere. She is presently Faculty Fellow in modern European history at Colby College and a guest reader for Sugar House Review.