Before There Is Nowhere to Stand

Appalled by the violence of Israel's Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in 2008-09, Joan Dobbie and her niece Grace Beeler, descendants of Holocaust survivors, issued a call for poems by writers of "Palestinian or Jewish heritage . . . for an anthology that strives for understanding . . . in the belief that poetry can create understanding and understanding can dull hatred." This book is a tribute to resourceful imaginations. Its purpose is to give readers an occasion to perceive the aspirations and passions of those whose lives have been affected by the struggle--in Joseph Conrad's words, "to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see." The poems are arranged in seven sections, each dealing with an attribute or phase of the Palestine-Israel struggle. When possible, selections alternate between Jewish and Arab authors, effecting dissonance in subject, emphasis, and attitude--an uneasy multiculturalism.