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.