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Critical Praise for Among the Angels of Memory

• This bilingual collection by the Jewish Chilean-American poet is the latest in a string of works dealing with her unique family history. A sequel to El ángel de la memoria/The Angel of Memory (Wings Press, 2001), it furthers the exploration of Agosín's great-grandmother, Helena Broder, who fled Vienna during World War II for Valparaiso, Chile. Inspired by a trip to Vienna and Prague, the author seeks out her ancestors' memory and those of others who suffered the horrors of the Holocaust. Hers is a poetry of fire and shorn women, of ashes and suitcases, but also of garnet jewelry and lilacs, love and song all of it in the name of resuscitating memory. In the poem "Cousins," she writes movingly of three cousins lost to Auschwitz: "Julia, Sonia, Silvia . . . I ask for . . . a century of peace /and memory / for every single one: /the dead Jews, / . . . / the women of Bosnia. / They are all named / Julia, Silvia, Sonia / and they all are mine."

  Taken together, the poems do not tell a linear story but are instead overlapping scenes and encounters from varied perspectives loosely grouped into two sections ("The Old World" and "The New World," before and after Broder's escape in 1939).An English-language essay serves as the introduction, tying this book to Agosín's larger body of work. Agosín fills these pages with tenderness and hope for a honeyed future; recommended for libraries and bookstores with large poetry sections.

  — Salwa Jabado

• Marjorie Agosín's muses have first names and last names and they inhabit with their brilliance the poetry of this Chilean-American writer.

  — Elana Poniatowska

• Agosín's poetic language engages the reader in a mesmerizing journey of inward reflection and exile.

  — Isabel Allende

• Marjorie Agosín proves the power of the word to transport us to the center of her humane and human vision.

  — Julia Alvarez

• Her poetry vibrates with electricity and compassion for those who cannot speak for themselves. She captures the soul of the lost and helpless.

  — Liv Ullmann

Reviews

• This bilingual collection by the Jewish Chilean-American poet is the latest in a string of works dealing with her unique family history. A sequel to El ángel de la memoria/The Angel of Memory (Wings Press, 2001), it furthers the exploration of Agosín's great-grandmother, Helena Broder, who fled Vienna during World War II for Valparaiso, Chile. Inspired by a trip to Vienna and Prague, the author seeks out her ancestors' memory and those of others who suffered the horrors of the Holocaust. Hers is a poetry of fire and shorn women, of ashes and suitcases, but also of garnet jewelry and lilacs, love and song all of it in the name of resuscitating memory. In the poem "Cousins," she writes movingly of three cousins lost to Auschwitz: "Julia, Sonia, Silvia . . . I ask for . . . a century of peace /and memory / for every single one: /the dead Jews, / . . . / the women of Bosnia. / They are all named / Julia, Silvia, Sonia / and they all are mine."

  Taken together, the poems do not tell a linear story but are instead overlapping scenes and encounters from varied perspectives loosely grouped into two sections ("The Old World" and "The New World," before and after Broder's escape in 1939).An English-language essay serves as the introduction, tying this book to Agosín's larger body of work. Agosín fills these pages with tenderness and hope for a honeyed future; recommended for libraries and bookstores with large poetry sections. -– Salwa Jabado, New York City

• San Antonio Express-NewsDecember 2006

  Marjorie Agosín is a professor, writer and activist. Readers of her poetry will discern her latest work, Among the Angels of Memory, as a continuation of her 2001 work Angel of Memory. In both collections she details the story of her great-grandmother Helena Broder who fled Nazi Vienna and the Holocaust in 1939 and relocated to Chile. Agosín revisits the memories of Helena Broder, her daily life, the nightmarish realities of her experiences in the Hitler annexed Austria, and Kristallnacht.

  This new collection more deeply depicts the memories of Helena through Agosín herself, intensely and headily immersed in empathic reveries first described to her by her own mother.

  Agosín writes the poetry of her great-grandmother in Spanish though Broder refused to adopt the language herself while living in Chile, where she and her Spanish-speaking descendants also lived as something like exiles. In an email interview, the poet describes her loyalty to Spanish as "both simple and deep." She adds, "I write in my mother's tongue and when I left for the USA, I felt all I had was my language. I loved it. I took care of it and always remained faithful to her."

  About writing only in Spanish, Agosín also asserts that Helena "left her country of Austria and thus she survived the camps. Chile and the Spanish world provided a home for her. Thus she became part of the covenant of the Spanish speaking world and I am only able to translate these emotions in Spanish."

  Agosín was born in the United States but spent much of her childhood in Chile. It is a country for which she feels an abiding affection. She concedes that Chile's "peculiar and most beautiful geography" the way in which the Andes and the ocean surround it, make it an "insular" world. However, she adds it is also a place that "has been praised and defined by poetry" and "the possibilities of language."

  Among the Angels of Memory is divided into two sections. The poems describe life for Helena before and after her passage to Chile. The first poems, including a moving prose poem written in first person from the point of view of Helena, introduce us again to Agosín's great-grandmother, her country, a "Vienna Night," where a neighbor is described as having "no time to rescue another Jew, / while books burned in her garden filled with geraniums." This is followed by "Traveling Bag," where Helena must steal away in the darkness like a criminal, and her only crime "was to be born Jewish, / nothing more."

  These are powerful poems of deep anguish and pain. In another poem entitled "Unpredictable Northern Train," the passengers on the train include "the shorn women" and "the gasping elders" traveling to the place of "nameless horrors" and "the home of that fog, / the silences beyond all silences, / where bodies burn like dead flowers."

  It is impossible to read all this and not consider the fate of other desaparecidos, others who disappeared decades later from Pinochet's Chile. Once Helena Broder's progeny were firmly settled in their adopted country of Chile, exile came again. Says Agosín, the dictator, who died in December, leaves a legacy of "injustice, of Human Rights violations." His passing, she believes, will finally allow "for a true healing of the country." Having visited Chile recently, Agosín found that "contrary to media information," she "sensed a relief with [Pinochet's] death, a sense of quietness, and more so the opportunity to end the darkest era of Chilean history."

  In the second section of the book with its "New World" poems, Helena is displaced in the new country. The poems of exile are Agosín's province always. The reveries are tentative, bewildered, unsettling and so intimate and personal that the story of the great-grandmother's exile is the poet's destiny as well. In "HelenaÕs Maps" she describes "the fragile geography of exile," where she cannot find her "beloved Andes, / scattered and blue." She adds "this map assures me / of the permanence of my own doubtful / survival, / but it does not have my history."

  Where is home for Marjorie Agosín? The professor of Latin American Studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts responds, "I have wondered about the meaning of my home after so many exiles from Europe to Chile and back to the USA." She adds, "My home is in my language, in my books, in the face of my children, but I still feel that my true home is Chile where I recognize myself and I am myself."

  In her preface to Among the Angels of Memory, Agosín emphasizes that it is "the sacred language of poetry" that can "conquer death and oblivion." And in the poem "The House of Memory" she accomplishes this with "I knit words, / luminous waves over the page, / calmly I take dictation. / And you on the other side of the words, / in the resonant clarity of light, / smile."

• School Library Journal

  Adult/High School – Agosin's poetry is a cathartic cry against the Holocaust and present-day wars and atrocities. The writer begins with a short prose introduction to the story the poems will tell of her grandmother's journey from the Nazis of Vienna to her new home in Chile. Immediately well oriented, readers are quickly drawn in through the poems' intensely personal and touching tone. Her deceased grandmother speaks plainly through her granddaughter as Agosin admits: "I take dictation./And you, on the other side of the words,/in the resonant clarity of light,/smile." So intimate, the poems seem to whisper, as in, "telling you this story/distresses me,/I can only say it in a poem/as I am unable to tell it to anyone." The bilingual format creates an additional sense of closeness, allowing readers to experience the poet's pieces in her native tongue. Her poems are sometimes angry, sometimes tenderhearted, always brutally honest, and their accessible intensity will capture teen readers. – Joy Murphy, Berkeley Public Library, CA © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.