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 Dr. David Jaffin was born to a Jewish family in New York and studied History, Art History and Psychology at New York University, where he was awarded a Ph.D.
At the age of 24 he went to Europe and did the unthinkable: a mere 16 years after Auschwitz he married a German woman, became a Christian, and embarked on the study of theology.
After graduating from Tübingen University, he became a Pastor in the Evangelilcal (i.e. Lutheran) Church, and then served as a minister for 20 years in Württemberg.
After this he was granted freelance status in order to continue with his writing. He had already made himself a considerable reputation as a writer of sermons and religious texts, and he is now the author of dozens of prose books in German, including stories for children, as well as a large corpus of poetry in English.
What others say
‘David Jaffin is a scrupulous weigher and weighter of words—by which I mean a poem is, for him, always a matter of collaboration with the true spirit of the language. Every word is given its value, neither more nor less.’
—Edward Lucie-Smith
‘David Jaffin’s Preceptions is a fine book. Jaffin’s poems, slight on the page, entice, engage, amuse. Yet their brief touchings often reach wholeness, and they are poems of philosophical consequence out of keeping with much of modern poetics. The poems catch perceptions in the act of happening, to be, the short-line verse appropriate to what becomes.’
—Paul Ramsey, The Sewanee Review
‘Jaffin’s poetry is as ‘modernist’ as abstract painting while still poetry in the traditional sense, whose purpose is the verbalisation of basic human experience and whose form derives from a serious exploration of language... it is remarkable what depth of experience Jaffin manages to relate through his severely limited vocabulary and imagery.’
—Victor Terras (Brown University)
‘Mr. Jaffin uses words with a real fineness of diction which emphasizes a characteristic understatement of emotion. One recognizes a cultivated sensibility. He adopts a theme and mode which one cannot help but admire. He writes very well indeed.’
—The late Norman Holmes Pearson (Yale University)
‘Jaffin’s Through Lost Silences offers a rare display of manifold poetic variety. Succinct and challenging enforcers of new insights and deeper understanding, his poems soar in far higher realms than those of prosaic description and rational analysis.... There is sincerity and conviction in Jaffin’s crisp, multi-sensory poeticisation of ideas. Existential and philosophical shapings of language, simple and complex at the same time, draw out the true nature of his chosen subjects in an original way overwhelming the faint echoes of older poetic traditions and leaving behind a profound aftertaste of experiences lived through for the first time.’
—Edward Batley (University of London)
‘David Jaffin is a master of the restrained but purposeful statement. If his poems do not have quite the briefness of the haiku, they have a good deal of its light-dark inflection and rounded perfection of form... Jaffin’s poems almost always give an impression of ‘light reflecting light’. The fact is, that if one wants restraint and elegance, he will find it in abundance here. Jaffin’s subtleties are, in short, dazzling.’
—The Library Journal on Conformed to Stone
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