His favorite word for what he sought in poetry was “charm,” and perhaps his most pervasive quality is an alluring whimsicality…Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts is, as Caples puts it, “a reasonable stop-gap, as a way to bring this work before a new generation of readers.” As stop-gaps go, it has a great deal to recommend it. Laughlin’s volume, with its still-vivid essay and thoughtful selection of 22 of Greenberg’s lyrics, remains a classic, and Caples has supplemented it with 10 more poems and three prose pieces, including “Between Historical Life,” Greenberg’s moving autobiographical narrative.—Jewish Review of Books
Samuel Bernard Greenberg (1893-1917) was born in the Jewish ghetto in Vienna and settled with his family in Manhattan’s Lower East Side at age seven. He contracted Tuberculosis and died at twenty-three.
The largely self-taught author died from TB in 1917 aged 23, but works such as this fully deserve their place in the history of modernist poetry.—The Guardian
His favorite word for what he sought in poetry was “charm,” and perhaps his most pervasive quality is an alluring whimsicality…Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts is, as Caples puts it, “a reasonable stop-gap, as a way to bring this work before a new generation of readers.” As stop-gaps go, it has a great deal to recommend it. Laughlin’s volume, with its still-vivid essay and thoughtful selection of 22 of Greenberg’s lyrics, remains a classic, and Caples has supplemented it with 10 more poems and three prose pieces, including “Between Historical Life,” Greenberg’s moving autobiographical narrative.—Jewish Review of Books
Rimbaud in utero.—Hart Crane
…a radical form of sprung lyric—a wild, sound-wracked syntactic syncretism that verges on the abstract and the rhapsodic…—Charles Bernstein
A strange but remarkable talent.—James Laughlin
