Live Long Enough is No 20 in the New Garland Series of poetry books, now published by Paekakariki Press.
The poems in Live Long Enough are an eclectic sample – of form and influence, style and mood. By turns autobiographical and encomiastic, they record a life of reading and travel. Acknowledging debts to aesthetic ancestors as diverse as Horace, Mascha Kaléko and Clive James, Newman commemorates more idiosyncratic paragons – grandparents, daughters and professors – as well as heroes and heroines of earlier poetry, among them Vergil’s warrior maiden and Schubert’s winter wanderer.
Rafaël Newman was born in Montreal, studied classics and comparative literature in Toronto, Berlin and Princeton, and lives in Zurich. He is the author of The Visible God: Staging the History of Money (UPA) and the editor of Zweifache Eigenheit: Neuere jüdische Literatur in der Schweiz (Limmat), and his scholarly work has appeared, in English and German, in various publications.