Gestapo Crows: Holocaust Poems

``My ears can almost hear those Jews, / Who, disguised as smoke, as ash, / Losing all hope, / Refused to die . . . '' writes the prolific, American-born Brodsky (co-author with William Heyen of Falling from Heaven: Holocaust Poems of a Jew and a Gentile ). Unfortunately, ``almost'' isn't good enough. The Holocaust, viewed by those who did not experience it directly, is not a new subject in American poetry. But in Brodsky's hands, the experience becomes almost trivial: ``Wife, dismissing me so systematically, / You might have been a Nazi Storm Trooper''; in a subsequent poem this gentile wife adopts a ``nouveau Reich'' lifestyle; the narrator of a poem describing the Independence Day holiday has a nightmare in which he sees the German sign Arbeit Macht Frei , or ``Work Makes One Free'' (originally on the gates to Auschwitz), over his bedroom door. There is not one poem here that conveys an understanding of rhythm, meter or any other tool used to transform rhetoric into poetry. Readers attracted to anything related to Holocaust literature might find this book of interest, but subject matter is a poor excuse for art. (Mar.)