Poetry for Students

148 Poetry for Students

We have lost Amichai the person, but we have

not lost the important critical corpus that has es-

tablished him as one of Israel’s most important po-

ets. Above all, we have not lost the poet: Amichai’s

poems continue to be taught in Israeli schools, and

selections from his books are required reading in

the academe.

Amichai the poet then is not dead, and so while

we mourn the death of the person, we give tribute

to his lasting legacy and celebrate his poetic art.

Source:Esther Fuchs, “Remembering Yehuda Amichai:

Homage to an Israeli Poet,” in Midstream, Vol. 47, No. 4,

May 2001, p. 27.

Gila Ramras-Rauch

In the following review of an updated version

of The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Ramras-

Rauch describes how Amichai “seduces his reader

with... simplicity,” while opening “a way into a

more complex world.”

Yehuda Amichai’s simple, beguiling, and chal-

lenging poetry continues to fascinate readers and

translators alike. He is recognized in Israel and

abroad for his seeming simplicity of tone, image,

and syntax. The centrality of a speaker in Amichai’s

poetry inevitably reflects the man himself: a gentle,

often self-effacing man whose soft voice is fre-

quently in contrast with the bold statements his po-

ems make.

Amichai uses known and familiar materials for

his poetry: the images of Jerusalem, his parents, his

loves, his children, the marketplace—all act as a

storehouse of raw materials for his verse. These fa-

miliar materials however, are often left behind

when his poetry, without warning, soars into a new

verbal reality where paradox, irony, and a certain

wonder coexist. In a way, Amichai seduces his

reader with his blatant declarative simplicity. The

almost prosaic opening allows for a way into a

more complex world. His world of analogies, meta-

physical conceits, images, and paradoxes changes

proportions while still using everyday imagery.

Among other things, is Amichai a political

poet? Is there a hidden agenda under his well-

turned verse? Are political issues alluded to in his

innocent apolitical poems? Amichai’s antiwar sen-

timent has been there from the inception of his writ-

ing. On a personal level, for instance, his basic

experience in the 1948 war and the death of his

close friend Dicky mark Amichai’s strong antiwar

feeling. In the short cycle “Seven Laments for the

War Dead” from Behind All This a Great Happi-

ness Is Hidinghe writes: “Dicky was hit.... But

he remained standing like that / in the landscape of

my memory.” The landscape of memory is but one

resource for Amichai’s warehouse inventory of

images. Memory, time, history, people, smells—all

float in his poetic orbit. Amichai is a perennial

observer. As he says, his verse is haunted by hollow

memories.

Amichai’s poetry rejects his work as a guide

to the perplexed. Love, a constant presence in his

lyric work, touches on intimacy and his familiarity

with the man-woman bond. At the same time, love

is a concept tied to the Platonic idea of Love: Love

that overcomes the physical, Love that transcends

time, space, and causality. Amichai is bounded by

the physicality of experience. Simultaneously, he

aches to break away from the very matter that gives

him his voice.

In this vein, in the attempt to transcend the ex-

pected and the causal, Amichai rejects a continu-

ity of idea or stanza and opts for contiguity as a

liberating mode. Simple words and complex no-

tions merge. His poetry is strewn with road signs.

The reader who is traversing the lines will, like a

child in a drawing book, connect the dotted lines

and thus create his or her own poetic map.

Amichai is fortunate to have had excellent

translators into English—from Asia Gutman, to

Chana Bloch, to Stephen Mitchell, to Benjamin and

Barbara Harshav and others. The comprehensive

selection A Life of Poetry 1948–1994appeared

three years ago (1994; see WLT69:2, p. 426). The

current volume was first published in 1986 by

Harper & Row. Updating that original, the present

edition adds several excellent translations from

Amichai’s 1989 book The Fist Too Was Once the

Palm of an Open Hand and Fingers(see WLT65:1,

p. 180), giving the reader another occasion to en-

joy the work of a poet whose complex simplicity

continues to challenge lovers of poetry.

Source:Gila Ramras-Rauch, Review of The Selected Poetry

of Yehuda Amichai, in World Literature Today, Vol. 71,

No. 2, Spring 1997, pp. 448–49.

Jeredith Merrin

In the following essay, Merrin provides an

overview of Amichai’s works, focusing on amalga-

mation and accessibility.

The contemporary Israeli poet Yehuda

Amichai is enjoying renewed popularity in this

country. What his widening readership can find in

the poetry as well as Amichai’s ventures into fic-

tion’ is a deliberate jumbling of the public and the

private, the past and the present, this country and

Not like a Cypress