Soft Cover, 54pp

David Haskell Cohen was born in Calcutta in 1925. His first poem, Reading, was written at the age of sixteen and another early poem, If I Could, appeared in The Times Illustrated Weekly of India in 1949.

About half the poems in this collection belong to this early period. They recall the horrors of the Bengal famine of 1943, the Holocaust, a rendevouz with Communism, and the frustrations of a young man in a nine-to-five job. The epic poem “Who are you, where are you from?” is a tour de force summarising the history of Baghdad Jewry and the strangeness of being an immigrant from India in London just after the Second World War.

After a hiatus of some forty years in London—during which he was first a political news correspondent, and later creative director and owner of an advertising agency in Mayfair—David Cohen resumed writing poetry upon his retirement and move to Jerusalem, Israel.

The poems in the second section of the book belong to our times. David looks back retrospectively, and forward to the challenges of retirement.