Nora Krouk’s work draws from a distinctive cultural background with a wry, ironic tone. She writes about people who have lived through many of the horrors of the twentieth century – the Holocaust, Stalinist persecutions, and suicide bombings. Her poems also, however, celebrate the survivors, those for whom a new hat or dress is more important than politics. And above all they celebrate life, the power of love and the joy of poetry.

– Elizabeth Webby, University of Sydney

With great sensitivity and compassion Nora Krouk faces and speaks of the personal demons of her Russian-Jewish background. Meeting evil and the moral dilemmas of action in times of violence and persecution, Krouk maintains a clear humane gaze. There is much understatement and delicacy in this book which makes us realise that every history is always also a private history and family history. To read this finely written collection of poems is both to become morally involved with the world and to experience the high price of witnessing:

   She wipes the table
   rubs over the sticky stains
   watches his face shut tight:
   listening to the pain.

– Peter Boyle


Nora Krouk’s poetry book Skin for Comfort was winner of the Interactive Press Picks for 2004. Given Krouk’s Russian-Jewish background, the title is especially poignant. Her private and family history, as revealed through the poems, is representative of a wide sweep of twentieth century inhumanity, including the Holocaust and Stalinist persecutions. Links are made to modern-day atrocities with chilling effect:

Consider the Gulf

Consider:
                had Hitler won
they would be pushing
the Auschwitz ashes
as fertilizer.

Had Stalin lived
into another decade,
annihilation of the cosmopolites
would have succeeded.

Had the Pacific War
favoured Nippon,
experimenting doctors
of Harbin camps
would have been rewarded,

but Hiroshima happened,
and Nagasaki
— an overwhelming sense
of collective guilt.

Guilt flourishes in the paddy fields
of our hearts - the ride.
Peace and atonement. Now,
at any price.
Baltics? Kuwait?
Pax. Amen.

Consider the Gulf…

Simply to consider, and perhaps reassess is what Skin for Comfort asks us to do. In “Yesterday” the past is relived:

This time we have called
Irkutsk

They publish books with the victims’ names
They’re still on “B”
although we are told
in two days they will find Father
...
Efim and I dream collective dreams
He saves his Father    Stops them in time
They’re still in China He wakes with a smile
— not all is lost;
But I descend to the permafrost of the frozen bones
the mincer grinds
step back over the blood-sticky floor
to the edge of the walls’ congealed terror
back to the improbable signed confessions
back to the USSR ’37.

As Krouk says in the poem “You Cannot Grieve”, ‘pain has so many faces.’

Section 3, “So Now What We Are”, allows us to enter the poet’s modern-day world with its tribulations and specific griefs, conveyed with humour and wry irony. Infidelities are revealed, and in “Done the ‘Obscene’ Thing: Aged” skin becomes a disappointment. The following poem is emblematic:

In the Night As a Switched-Off Heater

still ticks, clocks are stilled
and the bedroom air gathers momentum
poetry without words moves invisible waves
washes over the shoals, over
the stranded boats, over regrets and hopes
going nowhere    Poetry or distress?
Grief or a heart condition?
Stumbling rendition of Chopin’s rain
interpretation of shadows    that last X-ray:
heart calcified though the blood still simmers.

This also demonstrates a favourite technique of Krouk’s, to have the title as the first line of the poem, allowing an enjambment, a flow-on effect. The spoken voice is omnipresent and the reader gains a strong sense of the poet. In “My Friend Valery”, her disjunctive style is delightfully summed up and exemplified:

I send my friend some poems
from Sydney. Usually Russian,
but lately English. My new creations
depend on space:
space between words,
   to define a place
      space between objects
or you and I…
I’ve sent off poems
and — presto — reply:

What’s all this??
The stammering lines,
pouring wild waterfalls,
piles of loose words…
Where’s punctuation.
Crusaders’ sword,
stopping just there…
slicing right through,
telling the reader
what to do…?

In Spanish they use
exclamation and question marks
TWICE: in front and at the
end of the sentence.
?And so what are these: ???
First you abandon the rhyme
and now punctuation!
What’s to become of you?
Commas, commas, where are
the commas???
      Yours distraught
            Valery

Links are established in this collection. Poems call to and recall each other across time and distance. “Christmas ’47” brings good memories, harks back to “N’aimez Que Moi. No River is Safe…” is more sombre, reminding us that ‘History pulls no punches’:

No river is safe, yet my Father said
don’t panic and you will not drown.
He trusted the buoyancy of water,
that amniotic fluid of life.
He trusted life, after rape and loss,
after the firing squads of his youth,
……………….Surely
he knows some eternal truths. I reach
for him, but he pales and fades into
that haze where the rivers flow.

The postscript to “Family Tree” encapsulates the attitudes of an older generation:

A family tree?
We burn all timber
for heating. It
saved our lives.

These are survivors. What, then, is their skin for comfort? It beings in the poem “She Touches Luminous Wood” (‘Now they know/ - touching saves babies’ lives/ This - skin to skin’), reaches its culmination in the poem that gives the book its title.

from Skin for Comfort

She says: They’re sending me
Russian books and reviews of biographies.
Published in the U.S. and France. Now.
Revolution happened three generations
ago, but there’s renewed weeping -
‘Russia…Rossiyia…’ And it gets to me.
Poets, who took their country into exile.
Exiles, whose luggage was Russia.
She says: ‘I, too, once wept over
a world I had never known…’

New migrants are trying Australian
skin for comfort. She is Australian.
Sorting herself out.


This is a compelling and important book. While not denying memories of a harrowing and soul-destroying past, it celebrates attention to life, to family and friendships, to the resurgent spirit of joy:

from Bar Mitzvah, 22 February 1997

I say let boys bar mitzvah, mothers wear hats
even as Deng’s ashes are scattered


— Margaret Bradstock, Five Bells