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The poems in Norbert Hirschhorn’s a cracked river carry such a freight that didacticism would seem inevitable. The last poem in the collection, ‘Renewal Soup’, relates some background: Hirschhorn is a physician who is also a survivor of the Holocaust. Furthermore, he doesn’t avoid the didactic the way Paul Celan did, by the allusive journey into objects and their significance, but rather, takes the discursive way, where every poem is its own narrative, following Robert Lowell’s injunction, “Yet why not say what happened?”

     There are some jewels in this collection, but some laying it on thick, too, that could have been solved by cutting. In ‘Renewal Soup’, for example, grace and moments of grace are brought in a little too often, and so begin to diminish their effect. And in ‘A Letter to C. from Beneath Mount Merapi, Central Java’, there are these three lines:

Some mornings the voice of a flute rises
On the mist from a lower valley.
It breaks my heart to hear it alone.

The third line doesn’t convince me, not because I can’t believe it to be true, but because “breaks my heart” is a cliché, however true it may be. He needs to give this truth to the reader in a way that can be felt again, without familiarity.

     One poem, though, ‘A Distant Country’, uses the peculiar distancing offered by the sestina to give the reader the pain of exile in a country of “humped, cramped folk”. The words he’s chosen as line-endings, to repeat through six and a half verses, are: search, country, ungenerous, stunned, disaster, and grief. These could be the recipe for a soapbox piece, but the happy device of a distant country, which could be the home of the brave, or any host country where the guest seeks, but doesn’t find, hospitality, and the freedom with which Hirshchhorn follows the spiral of this thought in his explorations of home and hopelessness, tilt the balance away from didacticism.

     But the danger is still there, even in ‘A Distant Country’, and he must put it right, because he has much to tell us. The problem is the usual one: that of reaching for a metaphor too quickly, rather than allowing it to grow in its own time. So there is at times a lack of freshness and a loss of poetic power, because the likenesses, comparisons and correlatives have come down from the shelf rather than up from the soil. Hirschhorn must continue writing: we need poets of his experience - Keats believed that poetry and medicine were both to do with healing - to bring back the knowledge we could not acquire otherwise.