In the following essay, Abramson discusses the theme of love in Amichai's poetry.

In the following essay, Gold discusses the recurring imagery of plants and flowers in Amichai's poetry.

In the following essay, Gold analyzes recurring motifs throughout Amichai's oeuvre.

In the following essay, Kronfeld argues that, despite the opinion of his detractors to the contrary, Amichai demonstrates in his poetry a clearly defined philosophical and ontological system of thought and belief.

In the following essay, Abramson discusses the theme of faith in Amichai's poetry, concluding, “Amichai's God is like no other God in Hebrew poetry.”

In the following essay, Alter discusses three novels of the post-Holocaust period—including Amichai's Not of This Time, Not of This Place—that attempt to reconcile survivors of modern Judaism with the horrors of the Holocaust.

In the following essay, Sokoloff examines the significance and use of language in El male rahamin as well as how the work fits into the modern Hebrew literary canon.

In the following essay, Mazor examines Amichai's unsentimental approach to the brutality of Israel's wars.

In the following essay, Hirsch explores central themes in the poetry of Amichai, such as love, war, history, and Jewish identity.

In the following review, Bloch and Kronfeld discuss Amichai's perspective on God and Judaism, as expressed in his poetry.

In the following essay, Kronfeld explores the ways in which Amichai retains accessibility while also using complex intertextuality in his poetry.

In the following essay, Hirsch praises Amichai's book of poems Amen, in particular his love poems and his ability to evoke major metaphysical issues through microcosmic images.

In the following review, Stiller praises Amichai as a poet who is representative of the Israeli spirit and tradition, but who also adds an air of modernity to the historical consciousness of his poems.

In the following essay, Flinker examines Amichai's use of the biblical figures of Saul and David in his poetry.

In the following review, Spicehandler finds Glenda Abramson's The Writings of Yehuda Amichai: A Thematic Approach to be a valuable contribution to Amichai criticism.

In the following review of Amichai's Open Closed Open, Biespiel offers a favorable assessment of the poet's accomplishments.

In the following essay, which was originally presented as an address in February 1985 in Mishkenot Sha'ananim, Jerusalem, to celebrate the English translation of Amichai's volume of short stories, The World Is a Room, Halkin explains the differences between a poet and a prose writer and speculates on Amichai's decision to turn to prose to express himself.

It is Amichai's unique poetic voice that has proved so appealing through the years, a voice consistently in consonance with the spirit of his people and his times. Not merely contemporary in a topical or linguistic sense, Amichai has displayed a charm and a wit which have endeared him to both an Israeli and an international reading audience…. Though they are generically and stylistically varied, Amichai's works … reverberate with relevance and insight, with aesthetic challenge an...

In the following review, Irwin praises the poems in Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai but questions the publisher's decision to have the poems retranslated.

In the following essay, Hadary offers a general assessment of Amichai's poetry, at the time of his death in the year 2000.

In the following essay, Bloch discusses the ways in which Amichai's poems address the meaning of the Jewish experience in history.

In the following review, Slavitt examines Amichai's characteristic use of irony.

In the following essay, which is part of the Foreword to The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Bloch explains Amichai's significance as a contemporary poet.

In the following review of Time, Young addresses Amichai's use of language, his religious themes, and the historical context of his poetry. Young concludes that Amichai's poetry “fills the reader with wonder.”

In the following review, Ramras-Rauch presents a brief overview of Amichai's career and praises his collected volume A Life of Poetry: 1948–1994.

[Yehuda Amichai] lives in history as a fish does in water…. [In Time the] theme of dislocation, of places wiped out behind him, while remaining nominal, haunts the verses of Amichai, who has been witness to the same kind of dispersal and replacement during all the days of his exile. As he says in one of his poems, "and since then the town / and since then the whole world."… [Amichai] writes lyrics in Biblical cadences. Reading them, we may remember that Hebrew, largely the langua...

In the following review, Ramras-Rauch presents a brief overview of Amichai's major themes and praises The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai as "another occasion to enjoy the work of a poet whose complex simplicity continues to challenge lovers of poetry."

To appreciate what [Yehuda Amichai manages to do in Amen], one has to imagine him as the chief character in a drama—chief in the sense that he is the one on whom we see the drama registering all its pressures. In this case, his speeches have the added authority that the role is real, and the drama is that crucial hinge of modern history—particularly the history of the West—which is the dilemma of modern Israel. (p. 10) The dramatic role which Amichai has had to perform obviously demands...

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

In the following review of Not of This Time, Not of This Place, Pickford praises Amichai's evocation of "survivor's guilt" and his protagonist's ambiguous response to post-war Germany but, finds the novel somewhat disjointed and meandering.

Repetition and change are the basic elements of the self-periodization which marks Amichai's poetry. Basic images occur and recur, and time gives this process of self-mapping its added dimension and sense of personal reality. Paradoxically, time is both the connecting and disconnecting factor in the perennial dialogue which Amichai conducts with his existence…. On one hand, the growth of the speaker in the poems [of Time] is intrinsically connected to the landscape, the land itself, Jerusalem....

In the following review, Sullivan praises Assia Gutmann's translations of Amichai's work.

In the following review, Publishers Weekly offers a favorable assessment of Amichai's poetry collection Open Closed Open.

In the following review, Ramras-Rauch offers a favorable impression of Amichai's volume of short stories, noting Amichai's ability to suffuse ordinary experiences with extraordinary insights.

Along with Miroslav Holub, Vasko Popa and Zbigniew Herbert, Yehuda Amichai is a member of that generation of poets who were late adolescents or young adults during Hitler's war and were deeply affected by it and by its contingent social, political, psychic and ontological consequences. Amichai is a deeply and unashamedly emotional poet, imbued with a strong streak of Jewish melancholy, yet able to be ironic about it and sometimes even to laugh. He always avoids the attendant dangers of bathos and sen...

As always, Amichai speaks (and often sings) in [Amen and Travels of a Latter-day Benjamin of Tudela] with a voice that is deceptively simple, understated, and utterly human. The poems in Amen are primarily short lyrics, lullabies, and laments, whose subjects revolve around the pain of longing and absence, the most haunting of human emotions…. [Travels of a Latter-day Benjamin of Tudela] consists of a series of fifty-six poems that have been simultaneously conceived of as a poetic autobiography and fi...

[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 experie...

Biblical themes and the Israeli landscape, which have always been strong elements in Amichai's poetry, are present in [Love Poems, a collection of poems he has chosen from his previous books, together with new pieces]…. The constant threat of war gives many poems a special urgency. Such references can also become superficial, though, as in "Once A Great Love." There is another side to Amichai as well: the man who speaks his love directly, without reference to place, history, or h...

"Love Poems" contains lyrics on love begun and lost, understanding and the absence of it, jealousy, separation and love transformed by memory. Situations fraught with emotion are presented with startling simplicity and economy of language. Detachment informed by an awareness of mortality pervades some of these poems; some speak objectively of human frailty in relationships: "People use each other/as a healing for their pain." Amichai offers advice and describes nights of love and...