Collected Poems Book

Yehuda Amichai is widely considered to be the most prominent poet of Israel, and certainly the best known Hebrew poet internationally. A Life of Poetry 1948-1994 is an appropriately comprehensive and timely evaluation of the body of work of one of our most valuable poets in any language. Employing the style and idiom of a post-Modernist - of a twentieth-century artist - and filtering it through the prism of his Israeli and Jewish sensibilities, Amichai's work is cosmopolitan, muscular, and ironic. Resounding with the exhilaration of the human drama - love, loss, death, war, eroticism, and the density of experience in human encounters - it is brought into sharper contrast by the ever-present precariousness of Israeli existence. The burden and legacy of this history, and its impact upon modern, secular society, places Amichai's work within a uniquely Israeli landscape - arid, verdant, cruel, and beautiful - while simultaneously transcending national and religious borders. His language resonates with biblical and sacramental allusion, but his thematic power lies in the depiction of an essential human sensibility. Translated from the Hebrew by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, A Life of Poetry contains authoritative retranslations, as well as work never before translated into English. With this volume, Amichai will take his rightful place beside the leading poets of the twentieth century.