Kaleidoscope by Gillian Lynn Katz

 

I just finished reading Kaleidoscope. It was a very moving journey and the poet’s words portray how deeply her childhood affected her.

 

Katz’s images are gripping, her language musical, her views are candid. I do need to reach out with my empathy for Katz’s suffering. The eyes of her childhood witnessed such dreadful behavior and prejudice in South Africa. Sounds like she has also encountered rough times in adulthood. So sorry for her grief but appreciate how she has dealt with pain by writing beautiful poetry.

 

I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves poetry and has compassion for oppressed people around the world.

 

Rating:  ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

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With exquisite sensitivity and an unflinching eye, Gillian Lynn Katz has achieved a collection of poetry that invites the reader into an emotionally compelling world. In Kaleidoscope, Katz fearlessly chronicles the turmoil and terrain of an almost royal childhood; navigates the painful journey from her homeland of South Africa to a new and unfamiliar life in America, and concludes with a “third act” filled with the anxieties, triumphs, and truths of her new life.

 

Katz’s poetic voice is both provocative and soulful, and offers a fearless glimpse into the poignant inner world of the modern immigrant, and deftly details, with compassion and artistry, the lyrical nuances of a life lived in exile.

–Andi Rosenthal, author of The Bookseller’s Sonnets – Eastchester, New York, March 2012

 

Rating: *****  [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

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Gillian Lynn Katz’s collection of poems, Kaleidoscope, has created a group of poems embedded in the difficulties of her early life in South Africa.

Each of these poems brings home to us the detailed particularities of that life in contrast to the first world life she lives currently in the suburbs of America.

 

The political is never handled in a crude way but is instead always brought to us through the subtle explication of the everyday, as in her poem, “Scarsdale,” where she compares the verdant life of both continents ending this way: “I still feel the thunderclap:\the cloudburst that blew\ a flower petal\across two continents.

 

Another quote from one of my personal favorites, “Tin cup, Tin Plate,” the opening goes like this, “A white girl with white hands\places a tin cup of milk tea\and four sugars\ on the back door step.” The simplicity of the imagery and the starkness of the language makes the white not just the whitest white but carries all the horrors that white and black mean in that sad country from whence she came. Even the phrase back step evokes both black and not the front door.

 

Ms. Katz’s collection has this kind of stark power over and over and I recommend you find this out for yourself by reading this fine collection.

–Joanna Clapps Herman, New York City January 20, 2012

 

Rating: *****  [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

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Gillian Katz is a passionate poet. The beauty, longing and intensity of the “petal that blew across two continents” are poignantly alive in her aptly named chapbook, Kaleidoscope.

 

With generosity, she portrays her early years in South Africa as a white person “free to roam” unlike people of color “who aren’t allowed/to call our South Africa/Home.”

 

She describes the everyday workings of apartheid as experienced by a child in her poem “Tin Cup.” and in her historical poems “Chicken Run “ and “A Drumbeat Cure for Aids” expresses the bitterness of exile from a beautiful homeland where it has become common for white women to wear guns in their brassieres and where others resort to superstitious cures.

 

In poems reflecting on her changed life in the U.S. and broader topics, Katz links new experiences to flower images remembered from the past and convinces the reader of the ex-pat’s heartfelt need to find “ a new truth” in new circumstances.

–Ruth D. Handel, poet, writer and teacher, is the author of Reading the White Spaces (Finishing Line Press, 2009) and poems in numerous journals.

 

Rating:  ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]