Yehuda Amichai Critical Essay | Critical Review by John Haines

SOURCE: "Poetry Chronicle," in The Hudson Review, Vol. 50, No. 2, Summer 1997, pp. 323-24.

In the following review, Haines discusses the contemporary relevance of Amichai's work in The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai.

I should perhaps defer speaking of poems in a language I do not know and cannot read, but the poems of the Hebrew poet, Yehuda Amichai, as translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell, have offered a useful means of comparison with the work of a few of our more immediate American contemporaries…. I must … refer briefly to the poetry of a place and a situation all too representative of our present world, and which in these poems has been written of with so much insight and passion.

     And so farewell to you, who will not slumber,
     for all was in our words, a world of sand.
     From this day forth, you turn into the dreamer
     of everything:...
(read more)