Song in Tammuz

“Song in Tammuz gives us a lyric voice that speaks—no, sings!—back to tradition, sings with devotion (to a ‘god attached to the end of your name / like the tail of a mare’), yes, but also with questioning (and whose letters are ’the last telegraphs to be sent before the city surrenders’). There is grief yet awareness that as she writes, ‘a last good lemon hangs from its tree.’ There is an incredibly memorable persona, Ruth, both mythical—and our own. There is a story of horror sewn out of silences, out of the unsaid. And, always, there is a song: ‘first anger, then hunger, then song.’ This is a marvelous first book.”

“In conversation with the Biblical book of Ruth, Avia Tadmor crafts a brilliant exploration of displacement, migration, and loss. Song in Tammuz merges the identity of the speaker with the character of Ruth, both women seeking to be known, both seeking the holy and the whole—in geography and intimacy. The poet uses form skillfully to contain memories of lost homes and the desire for new homes. Elegiac, ekphrastic, and definition poems explore presence and absence while beseeching some higher power: ‘even now, see me asking compulsively / for a newness, a promise / however unshapen.’ From a grandfather in pre-Holocaust Poland, to Ruth’s famine-stricken migration from Moab to Judah, to the speaker’s move from Israel to the U.S., horses, crops, land, rivers, and light provide a language that binds old and new. Tadmor eloquently captures the paradox of exile: ‘…Although I am countried and housed / I remain stupefied in my / journey on most days / still searching for home.’”

“A speaker in one of Avia Tadmor’s poems says, ‘We utter // what we can’t reach but spend our lives / reaching for.’ This reaching-for gives Song in Tammuz its quality of deep embodiment, illustrating how a body that is singularly in the world is also a representative of other minds, hearts, and voices across time. Bringing together story, memory, and history, Song in Tammuz reckons with how the present is always weighted by the past. With our current moment so darkened by crisis and grief, Avia Tadmor insists on a countervailing dignity and illumination. As a speaker in another poem claims, ‘Her pen is a stronghold, a lighthouse.’”

“Avia Tadmor’s astonishing debut, Song in Tammuz, examines biblical and contemporary explorations of identity, power, and desire, but desire here doesn’t seek to occupy but rather enjoin with tenderness and care. This formally dexterous collection takes us on journeys across deserts and cityscapes, centuries and continents. The centerpiece is a striking, innovative series made of numbered blank pages with footnotes at the bottom, which reflects erasure and embodiment, annihilation and resilience, and acts as loving tribute for a grandfather who was the sole member of his family to survive Auschwitz. Family, friends, lovers, and readers are invited to enter visceral, sensual, full-bodied worlds. These are rapturous and necessary poems that alight: ‘first anger, then hunger. Then song.’”

“Avia Tadmor is looking for new names for home. Song of Tammuz is stunningly tuned to the frequency of loss—loss of beloveds, of homelands, of identity born of place. These songs are steeped in her suspicion that “love works like any language…we utter what we can’t reach” but keep trying to, with the “perpetual hunger of dogs.” Tadmor’s speakers, who straddle centuries, echo each other’s migration and displacement, and include the Biblical Ruth, in whom we might find ourselves, “know[ing]…that each stride onward, there will be more & more to lose.”  Yet across generations, these voices are humming with a commitment to live, to forge new loyalties, to make lives built from love even when it is scarred by distance.

This collection of poems, and this poet, so honest in her assessment of how loss ‘burns through us,’ keeps me reading and returning, reading and returning. The language of longing, of an urge for intimacy despite the ‘terror of being alone here together,’ is tuned with such precise attention it brings solace. Tadmor’s collection reminds me that poetry, in its willingness to pay such attention, enacts love—miles and oceans be damned.”