he sixth and the latest in the Crimson Edge Chapbook Series of Chicory Blue Press--a series admirably "established to support and encourage older women writers"--is Anneliese Wagner's Murderous Music. A handsomely designed and printed digest-size book, it contains sixteen poems, one prose poem and a fine seven-page prose Afterword. Every one of her offerings is a revelation, working equally well in book form or as a separate piece.

In Murderous Music, there is nothing experimental or remote. Wagner writes what it means and what it meant to be a Jewess, a refugee of Nazi Germany's cruelties. Interestingly enough, her actual memories of child-life in Germany, and later in New York, were "wiped out", she says, "until about age thirteen". Her writing "brings to light what was meant to be lost". The creative process for her was a sort of auto-hypnosis and we are fortunate that she was her own willing subject. Wagner writes at times from a wide, tolerant perspective: "writing is an uncovering", at times about others from a perplexed anger: "For years I forgot/to think of your 1,390 days in the mud-floor/barracks for 60 women, daily cabbage leaf/ floating in foul water, bread too hard/ for false teeth, nor your 1,390 nights under/ one frayed blanket, bugs devouring you."

When a book begins, "We will get rid of the Jews, Hitler says/and my parents hear him. They can/ hope it will blow over. Or send me off/ on a Kindertransport and make a suicide pact," it has our attention. Wagner refuses to let up on the tension of the emotional push-and-pull: we are at its mercy. And a good thing that is, too, because there will never be enough said, sung written or documented on film that will cleanse the world, the Jewish people of their ghost, the Holocaust.

Floating above the requiem of Murderous Music ("For three days jammed into the cattle/train to Auschwitz,/ imploring God to let you die, did He?"), there is an anthem of hope and endurance: ". . . wait/as in the grave for nerves/ to lie down, the dark to grow/ thin as gauze, the door/ to dreams to unlatch and/ for a time/ be a bear in its lair,/ roll in the humus of living." It is a psalm, part pardon, part repudiation.

Toward the final pages, the prose poem, "Brown Shirt," is, on the surface, a calm coming together of past with present; but, beneath, is an unwritten message. It blows between Wagner's lines like human ashes and chill the marrow, chill the soul: "It/ used to be safe, the old man said, to walk in the forest."

We cannot, must not ignore Anneliese Wagner's Murderous Music, her short book of brave, noble words. Readers will come away from them enlightened, enriched and, I like to think, better persons than we were.