Green in a Landscape with Ashes

In Anna Halberstadt’s second full-length collection in English, Green in a Landscape with Ashes, the poet’s brushstrokes are those of a muralist and miniaturist. Halberstadt brings in themes of love, loss, and life’s abundance informed by her post-Holocaust childhood in Vilnius amidst a country’s amnesia and silence about its murdered Jews. An immigrant with aging parents and a young son, she leaves a broken marriage, a floundering Soviet state, and a career in psychology for the unknown. There is a god who won’t forgive present in Halberstadt’s work. ‘Where are you/ the beautiful shining angel/to stop Abraham’s knife?’ We follow her pilgrimage through Europe’s cities, the poet marking the continent with her wry, penetrating meditations. Elegant, crafted, and having the authority of Akhmatova, Halberstadt’s virtuosity enables her to embrace life’s suffering as well as its bawdy side with the directness of a Mae West. ‘You can love a man/ who can’t make you come.’ These juxtapositions and discontinuities work brilliantly.