A.C. Jacobs (1937 - 1994), Engels dichter, verwees in gedicht naar #Spinoza

The Guardian bracht gisteren dit gedicht, Supplication van A.C. Jacobs, als gedicht van de week. Zie aldaar voor een toelichting en meer informatie over A.C. Jacobs.

Ik scande het gedicht uit

A.C. Jacobs, Nameless Country: Selected Poems. Edited by Merle Bachman & Anthony Rudolf. Carcanet Press Ltd, 2018 - books.google - met daarbij:

A.C. (Arthur) Jacobs was born in Glasgow into an Orthodox Jewish family in 1937 and grew up under the shadow of the Holocaust. An erudite and committed poet from a young age, he became a self-made migrant, a wanderer through countries and through other people’s more settled lives. He was a Jew in Scotland, a Scot in England, and a diaspora Jew wherever he travelled. Nameless Country returns selections of A.C. Jacobs’ poetry to a 21st-century audience. His poems compel our attention because they bear the stamp of their long-ago moment but in their embrace of complex identities, speak clearly to our own.

Op de cover: R.B. Kitaj, Cecil Court, London W.C.2 (The Refugees) - 1983-4
This painting is set in Cecil Court, a street famous for its second-hand bookshops and a favourite haunt of the artist. It is one of many paintings made by Kitaj arising out of an increasing awareness of his own Jewishness. He wrote, 'I have a lot of experience of refugees from Germany and that's how this painting came about. My dad and grandmother ... just barely escaped.' The work shows the artist reclining on a sofa while figures from his life pop out of the street behind him. Kitaj has explained that this theatrical composition was inspired by the peripatetic troupes of the Yiddisher Theatre in Central Europe, which he had learned about from his grandparents and from in the diaries of the writer Franz Kafka. [Tate Gallery London label]