Shiva's Drum

By Stephen Cramer

Departing from simple observations of the people and setting around him-- neighbors, friends, and lovers in New York City--Stephen Cramer's Shiva's Drum explores personal and familial relationships set to the rhythms of jazz in an urban landscape. Though comfortable at the edge, these poems deal with reality and move forward by transforming pain into beauty.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0252072049
• ISBN13: 9780252072048
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.41 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.8" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A Difficult and Rewarding Collection

Stephen Cramer's Shiva's Drum is histories, street scenes, memories, shadows, and religions. Bodies, grunts, beats, and scars are the feelings I get from his poems. What makes Shiva's Drum a collection that is more than angst or writhings about within memories is Cramer's able writing, which works all of these former things into quick, living poems that go beyond his own experience. Scenes in Penn Station and India have a common rhythm. The poet takes up memories and scenes and then, smashing them into bits in the process, orders them along a greater beat. Cramer offers the reader a clue in the book's epigraph: the eponymous drum of the book's title "beats the rhythms not only of music and sex but also of time which ultimately extinguishes us" through these poems.

Rythm and Flow

Shiva's Drum is a collection of poems by Stephen Cramer that flow into each other as much as they stand out in their own unique rhythm and meaning. The pieces mostly deal with humanity, music, and culture. Cramer integrates lyrics, a epigraph from the bible, and current affairs (both public and personal.) These fingerprints of Cramer's writing style seem to engage the reader, and make them feel inside the stories. He deals with darker themes as well. In the second section of the book, "Three Little Birds, 130th Street" juxtaposes the lyrics of Bob Marley's song playing in the background, to a woman being attacked by someone she knew and saved by the narrator. The next poem, "Two Tattoos," deals with addiction and abuse, and the symbol of scars being not what they where from, but meaning what the bearer assigns them. Regardless of subject, each poem is clearly presented as Cramer felt them; each sense is attended too and satisfied, with the pace of the city and the poets' life.

Shiva's Drum

A gorgeous and nuanced heartbeat infuses the poems in Stephen Cramer's Shiva's Drum--pulsing the reader through deftly-executed narratives that explore the rhythmic cycles (both large and small) of life, hammering out marvelously-crafted images, and drumming up rhythmically taut lines that ebb and flow with grace and style. Cramer's poems possess both razor-sharp clarity and immense compassion, and Shiva's Drum is a wonderful debut.

poetry that connects

Let me put it simply: most poetry written over the last 50 years leaves me cold. Therefore, you can imagine how refreashing--no, far more than that--you might say astounding--I found Shiva's Drum: poetry that connects to what I have seen, and heard, and felt, in a way that reminds me of the best theatre, engendering the feeling that we are not alone and that others around us have shared our common experiences, of beauty, and sadness, and of hope. This is a remarkable work.