BLACK OVER RED (Rothko)
You move into the chapel of his colours,
Black over red,
And sense the slight manoeuvre
Of a black door
Trying to invade the deeper space.
A fragrance away
Another panel invites light
To come forward …
Lotte Kramer is well-known as a poet of exile, of the Holocaust and of the healing discovery of rural England. Black over Red, which takes its theme from a Mark Rothko painting, is her tenth collection. Here her eye for detail and openness to the new Europe also takes in the pleasures of music, painting, travel and family life.
Lotte Kramer came to England as a child refugee in 1939. She is married and lives in Peterborough, where she is a volunteer worker at the City Museum. Her poems have appeared in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies, as well as on the London Underground.
Previous collections have included Selected and a bilingual volume published in Mainz, the German city of her birth. 'The core of Kramer's work could genuinely be described as Holocaust poetry, a silent watercolour Kaddish, one made in England out of such post-war materials as were available at the time.' - George Szirtes 'Her poems appear simple, but their lucidity is that of deep, unmuddied waters.' - Anne Stevenson
You move into the chapel of his colours,
Black over red,
And sense the slight manoeuvre
Of a black door
Trying to invade the deeper space.
A fragrance away
Another panel invites light
To come forward …
Lotte Kramer is well-known as a poet of exile, of the Holocaust and of the healing discovery of rural England. Black over Red, which takes its theme from a Mark Rothko painting, is her tenth collection. Here her eye for detail and openness to the new Europe also takes in the pleasures of music, painting, travel and family life.
Lotte Kramer came to England as a child refugee in 1939. She is married and lives in Peterborough, where she is a volunteer worker at the City Museum. Her poems have appeared in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies, as well as on the London Underground.
Previous collections have included Selected and a bilingual volume published in Mainz, the German city of her birth. 'The core of Kramer's work could genuinely be described as Holocaust poetry, a silent watercolour Kaddish, one made in England out of such post-war materials as were available at the time.' - George Szirtes 'Her poems appear simple, but their lucidity is that of deep, unmuddied waters.' - Anne Stevenson