Review of Aleph Bet by Sue Rose, pub. Cinnamon Press 2025

[sheenaghpugh]

This is one of those collections inspired by Covid, but in an odd way. The author, though of Jewish descent, had not learned Hebrew as a child, nor especially missed it, but “the imposed solitude and feelings of collective dread in those strange times prompted an urge to reclaim something of my heritage and explore my identity. My parents were both dead by this time and the vacuum of lockdown made me long for community and a renewed continuity with the past.”

Hence a renewed engagement with learning the language. But Rose, besides being a poet, is a translator, and soon became interested in the language for its own sake rather than just as a source of personal memories. “When I did more research into the letters, I became fascinated by their different layers of meaning and the further I delved into the symbolism of each letter, the more interested I became.”  And so we have a sequence of poems in response to each of the 22 Hebrew letters. It also, as befits a project concerned with heritage, includes images of religious objects which had significance for her forebears.

It is obvious from the first, title, poem how conscious she is of the history and physical reality of language; the way its shapes evolved from pictures and from being carved into stone (“Aleph Bet” is of course the ancestor of “alphabet”):

      rapped right to left, hammer
     and chisel tap-dancing
     thought into endurance,
     tablet dust a halo rising.

She is conscious too of shape, the shape that sounds make of a mouth and their own shape on the page

     this letter is a hard kiss
    of sound, a pursing of lips […]

     This is the sign,
     in shape and meaning,
     for a house, its door open,
     beckoning always
      (Bet)

Our letters are a lot further removed from pictograms than those of the Hebrew alphabet.  Though C and G are our closest equivalents of the Greek gamma and Hebrew gimmel, neither much resembles a camel with an outstretched neck, as gimmel does. The recognisablility of the pictograms enables us to see what was important to the people who invented these ways of visually representing sounds: a tent, a riding animal, water. They also lend themselves to imagery: mem can mean water, but also a womb, since water is the source of life. All these layers of meaning (somewhat reminiscent of the readings of Philip Pullman’s alethiometer) naturally fascinate a linguist like Rose, and of course for all those fortunate enough not to be monoglots, there is also the fascination of their accidental resemblance to the words of another language:

      One
     of the elemental mothers—
     aleph, mem, shin: air, water, fire—primordial
     mem keeps mum,
     clamp of lips at teat,
     a murmur of mam, mummy, am, immi,
     names like mementos
     recalling the mmm
     of comfort and home.
      (Mem)

There is of course a personal relevance to this, which surfaces elsewhere:

      this letter
     is forced between lip
     and teeth, delivering
     the vim in words
     like lev, heart, avi,
     my dad, hav, give, ahava,
     love
      (Vet)

Ultimately though, if I had to define the overarching theme of this collection, it would be neither Judaism nor a sense of personal identity and heritage, but the nature of language. How and why it develops, how it works physically, how it shapes our thoughts. The notes at the end, explaining more about the individual letters, will be fascinating to anyone with an interest in linguistics. And there are times in the poems when the wordplay begins to echo George Herbert, convinced that two words do not sound alike by pure accident:

      Repentance
     may yet ring changes
     to convert a pauper,
     rash, and rasha, a rascal,
     to rosh, head, the skull
     a crown, righteous as one
     throwing stones
      (Resh)

Apart from a couple of slightly unexpected near-contemporary images in “Shin” – “fingers split like Spock/for a tripartite salute” – and “Dalet” – “the blinking 404/error of existence” – there is only one definite reference to a contemporary event: covid, in “Kaf/Khaf”. But the last poem, “Unknown”, concerns a letter traditionally said to be missing from the alphabet and whose eventual revelation will set all wrongs right:

      this is the missing shape
     that will mend the place
     of hurt where grief plumes
     like a city of debris rent
     with sirens

It is implied that we don’t yet even know how to make the sound of this letter; it might be palatal or labial, but if we ever find out,

      it will rise in thanksgiving
     from our depths and press
     its utterance to the cheek
     of the child who sleeps
     through the night’s silence.

Which last outcome we can all agree would be highly desirable, though it currently seems most unlikely. This is a sequence which would appeal to anyone interested in heritage and identity, but above all in language.