Third Temple

A house on a leaf is a precarious and fanciful construction, yet it gracefully covers the leaves of Richard Chess's third book of poetry, Third Temple. Painted by Edita Pollaková, a child caught in the dislocation and catastrophe of the Holocaust, this watercolor preserves an audacious, innocent vision of structure and renewal against all odds. It is just such structure and renewal that Chess's poems seek as they sing, shout, whisper, accuse, tease, twist, and mourn. Animal sacrifice and blood libel, the Zohar and Solomon ibn Gabirol and Tevye set them going. Languages, too, for some of the poems include Hebrew as they sing of the scattering of kingdoms, the dispelling of names, and the "aleph bet" of being. No ordinary temple, this book. Let it challenge and delight you with language lessons that won't leave.