ABSTRACT
This chapter explores that Primo Levi's poems are sometimes positivistic, recounting historical details in poetic form, but, more importantly, they also form metatestimonies, modulating Levi's famous prose narratives such as If This Is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved. Whereas Wilfred Owen critiques his own testimony within poems such as 'Insensibility' and 'Apologia pro Poemate Meo', Levi juxtaposes his prose with the scathing rhetoric, and demand for hyper-attentiveness, in texts such as 'Shema'. The poem 'Buna' begins as testimony by recounting the experiences of chemical kommando. Like 'Buna', 'Shema' is poetic testimony in its own right: Levi invites the reader in stanza two to consider the description of a typical man and woman in Auschwitz. 'Shema' also functions as metatestimony in relation to Levi's prose texts, more explicitly than 'Buna', since it was selected as an epigraph for If This Is a Man.
