This Crazy Devotion by Philip Terman
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Poetry. Jewish Studies. Philip Terman’s latest poetry collection, THIS CRAZY DEVOTION, begins appropriately enough with “Tormented Meshuggenehs,” “the crazy sages… / who dervished across the hayfields / and paused to yawp a parable to the cows about the seven beggars…” This passage announces much about the poetry that follows: that its craziness indeed is of the order of devotion in the spiritual sense, rooted in Judaism; and also that it often takes place in bucolic surroundings, rooted in the land. And why is this a little surprising, this conjunction of Jewish life and rural setting? For Terman they are seamless and sacred, and by portraying his Jewishness as woven through a life and landscape familiar to many (non-Jewish) readers, he dispels stereotypes and creates a community of mutual recognition and understanding. That would be virtue enough to applaud this collection, but it offers many other pleasures. “I am talking about this world, there is no other,” he declares in the long and lovely meditative “Garden Chronicle” that forms the final section of the book. Such a world it is, full of all of the things to which he is crazily devoted, all of the things he writes about with such acuity and tenderness in these poems: heritage and faith, social justice, poetry, and even (in the title poem) almost meeting Bob Dylan–but foremost, his family and nature, both of which sustain him.
Year first published: 2020
