[The overall theme of Yehuda Amichai's Time is TIME itself] and what emerges is a sense of what it means to have lived past 50, to have undergone the fortunes and misfortunes of a lover of women, an incorrigible one at that, but also to have lived and fought through 3 wars in the 30 years of his country's brief existence. Moreover, Amichai is a Jerusalemite, which adds to the complexity of his vision…. [For] to live in Jerusalem, with its very complex history, and its immemorial experience, layer upon layer upon layer of speaking stones, adds to a person's sense of the past….

Amichai blends his own pathos, personal history, nostalgia, humor and a specially Jewish mixture of stoic resignation and acceptance, of history, people, personal unhappiness and very deep, almost undefinable happiness to his times, and that larger continuum he calls TIME….

There are many sweetly sad poems about...