Ad ora incerta (Collected Poems, translated into English as Collected Poems by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann) was published by Garzanti in 1984 (English edition: Faber, 1988). Levi wrote poetry throughout his life — beginning during and immediately after his time in Auschwitz — but regarded it as secondary to his prose and published it reluctantly and sparingly.
The poems address the same themes as the prose: the camp experience (“Shemà,” his most famous poem, demands that the reader remember the camps’ victims and is modeled on the Jewish prayer); chemistry and the natural world; the pleasure of work; memory and forgetting; aging and death. But the poems operate differently from the prose: they are more emotionally direct, less analytical, more willing to express feeling without the intellectual apparatus that characterizes Levi’s prose style.
“Shemà” (1946) — placed as an epigraph to If This Is a Man — is among the most powerful poems written about the Holocaust. It begins with the prayer’s traditional opening (“Listen”) and commands the reader to remember those who lived in mud, who fought for bread, who died for a yes or a no. The final lines curse those who forget: may their house fall, may disease strike them, may their children turn their faces from them.
The poems are spare and precise — Levi had no patience for rhetorical excess or poetic padding. Each poem says what it needs to say and stops. This economy makes them extraordinarily concentrated: brief poems that carry enormous emotional and intellectual weight.
Collecting Collected Poems
First edition (Garzanti, Milan, 1984): As Ad ora incerta. Cloth with dust jacket.
First English edition (Faber, London, 1988): Translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann.
Market values:
- Garzanti first (1984): $50–$125
- Faber first English (1988): $25–$60
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate appreciation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Levi write poetry? Yes. Levi wrote poetry throughout his life, beginning in Auschwitz. His poems are spare, precise, and deeply moving — reflecting the same qualities as his prose. The poem “Shemà” (a rewriting of the Jewish prayer that opens If This Is a Man) is one of the most powerful Holocaust poems ever written.