Henry Weinfield reviews The Biographer by David M. Katz in the online journal Restless Messengers.
David Katz’s fifth collection is aptly titled, not only because its longest poem gives the book its name, but because in many of the shorter ones, the poet, now in his mid-seventies, is examining his past as if from the outside—as a biographer rather than an autobiographer. This is a memory book, but one in which there is always the consciousness that the self being remembered is different from the self that is remembering. “The person I remember couldn’t lie”—this is the first as well as the last line of a poem (one of my favorites) that is simply and beautifully called ‘The Person I Remember.’ ”
