Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English
Categories
Poetry
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http://us.macmillan.com/thepoetr …

THE POETRY OF YEHUDA AMICHAI

Jehuda Amichai

The largest English-language collection to date from Israel's finest poet.

Few poets have demonstrated as persuasively as Yehuda Amichai why poetry matters. One of the major poets of the twentieth century, Amichai created remarkably accessible poems, vivid in their evocation of the Israeli landscape and historical predicament, yet with universal resonance. His are among the most moving love poems written in any language in the past two generations--some exuberant, some powerfully erotic, many suffused with sadness over the fate of separation that casts its shadow across love. In a country torn by armed conflict, these poems poignantly assert the preciousness of private experience cherished under the repeated threat of violence and death. Amichai's poetry has attracted a variety of gifted translators on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1960s to the present. Assembled by the award-winning literary scholar and translator Robert Alter, The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai is by far the largest selection of the master poet's work to appear in English. Gathering the best of the existing translations alongside Alter's expert renderings, this edition offers both untranslated poems published for the first time and new, authoritative versions of Amichai's finest works. With this collection, a vital poetic voice is now available to English readers as it never has been before.

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Book Published 2015-11-01 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Comments

Amichai's art is as appealing in its depths as in its shallows Amichai glides quickly between his own poetic suggestions, and this supple navigation credits his inventions with the otherness of their existence: he proceeds as if his own metaphors had the naturalness of found things, not the artifice of made things Amichai has many modes, but a faithful and fortifying humanism is his commonest and his most delightful [H]e belongs not only to Israel and to the Hebrew language but to all of us. Read more...

As is always the case with great poets, Amichai describes his own environment in his own terms, yet we find in his perceptions our world. His concerns are our concerns made clear and intelligible, and his feelings are our feelings more deeply felt . . . This is an indispensable collection, packed with unforgettable poems.

[T]he book is impressive in its scope while allowing for direct access to the poems.

Like Czeslaw Miloszanother great poet who was simultaneously national and personalAmichai manages to become a representative man; he is an Israeli and a Jew and soldier and a lover and a father, all at once He writes about Jerusalem with the intimacy of a disillusioned lover, a friend who remains faithful despite repeated trials and impositions; he empathizes with the very stones He is like a juggler who manages to keep the big, dangerous, awkward chainsawsGod, Judaism, Israel, Holocaust, war, sex and lovealways in the air. The miracle is not that he doesn't get hurthe doesbut that he always goes on. Adam Kirsch