Velvel's Violin by Saphra, Jacqueline

Author: Saphra, Jacqueline

Poetry by individual poets

Published on 6 July 2023 by Nine Arches Press in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 72 pages
138 x 216 x 13 | 156g

Velvel's Violin, a deeply moving and political fifth collection by TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Jacqueline Saphra places us on the shifting ground between past and present. Through its search for missing histories of the Jewish diaspora, the book is a call for empathy and a warning to a world where the legacy of the Holocaust echoes current narratives of prejudice, war, displacement, and migration.

Saphra's precisely-tuned writing ranges through tones of dark humour, lyrical beauty and moments of transcendent joy to find assonance between the turbulence of now and a family history of fragmented stories, irreparable loss and miraculous escapes. Between each poem - forgotten songs, weeping forests, buried violins - sound and silence combine to speak of love, absence and survival.