Velvel's Violin

Revealing
stories, missing histories and collective traumas from the Jewish
diaspora: a warning to a world where hatred is on the rise.

Velvel's Violin, a moving and political fifth collection by TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Jacqueline Saphra, places us on the shifting ground between past and present. Through missing histories of the Jewish diaspora, it is a call for empathy and a warning where the legacy of the Holocaust echoes current narratives of displacement and migration.Velvel's Violin, a deeply moving and political fifth collection by TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Jacqueline Saphra places us on the shifting ground between past and present. Through its search for missing histories of the Jewish diaspora, the book is a call for empathy and a warning to a world where the legacy of the Holocaust echoes current narratives of prejudice, war, displacement, and migration. Saphra's precisely-tuned writing ranges through tones of dark humour, lyrical beauty and moments of transcendent joy to find assonance between the turbulence of now and a family history of fragmented stories, irreparable loss and miraculous escapes. Between each poem - forgotten songs, weeping forests, buried violins - sound and silence combine to speak of love, absence and survival.