Conflicts

By Herb Brin

In this moving collection of poems, Herb Brin lyricized man’s basic humanity – and his all-too frequent inhumanity. Above all, Brin shines light on injustice, as he turns his eye to conflicts that roil across the expanse of history. “Where there is conflict, pray for conscience,” wrote Brin as, in powerful verse, he forces the reader to confront his or her own conscience. Herb Brin was a courageous journalist and publisher. But as a poet he also built a world-wide following for his brash style and unflinching passion..

• Language: English
• Publisher: Herb Brin
• Release date: Aug 23, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476483870

Herb Brin

Herb Brin (1915 – 2003) was born and raised in Chicago. Herb was an investigative reporter for the City News Bureau and Los Angeles Times, a world-recognized poet, and pioneering Jewish journalist. He founded the Heritage, a chain of Jewish community newspapers spanning southern California, where he served as editor, publisher and columnist. His books include: Conflicts, My Spanish Years, Wild Flowers, Nobody Died Laughing, Poems from the Rubio, Ich bin Ein Jude, and Justice, Justice. He is survived by three sons, Stan, David and Dan.

Book preview

CONFLICTS

By Herb Brin

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012

Originally published 1971

Jonathan David Publishers

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Where there is Conflict

Pray for Conscience

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PREFACE

We live in an age of bureaucratic labels and professional specializations, so most readers of this volume – and of the earlier Wild Flowers and Justice Justice – will color Herb Brin as a poet.

Thousands of readers of the four Heritage newspapers, on the other hand, will categorize Herb as a hard-hitting editor of the Chicago Front Page school, from which he graduated cum laude.

Bot labels fit, but they stick to one man.

Herb’s poetry and journalism, like the heart and the mind, are separate but complementary organs of the same body, facets of the same personality. And in neither field, does Herb fall into the currently fashionable mold.

He rejects the bloodless, morally castrated journalism that Objectively assigns equal space to God and the devil -- and which makes one big city daily a carbon copy of practically every other paper in the country.

His reporting harks back to our country’s younger and tougher days, when an editor imprinted his personality on every page of his journal, to the delight of the righteous (his supporters) and the consternation of evil-doers (his opponents).

Herb’s poems, too, while often concerned with the stuff of today’s headlines, reflect an earlier style, when poetry spoke in the language of the people and they listened. His is not the anemic, obscurant verse of the current poetry establishment, whose esoteric navel contemplation is enjoyed by an ever-narrowing clique of devotees.

Nor will he take refuge among the ragged ranks of the poetic underground, an anti-establishment establishment equally incoherent in its language and thought. Brin is that rarity among humans, his own man.

In the first poem of tis volume, the poet laments that they plant no flags to conscience. It is Herb’s great merit, and the underlying thread between the poet and the reporter, that he himself