SOURCE: "Edward Hirsch: Poet at the Window," in The American Poetry Review, May-June 1981, pp. 44-7.

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.

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Yehuda Amichai has thus far published three books of poetry in English—Songs of Jerusalem and Myself, Poems, and Amen. These books are the work of an imaginative writer with a unique ability to render and enact the complex fate of the modern Israeli, the individual man locked in and responding to history. Amichai is a historical poet of the first order, a political writer in the deepest sense of that term. At the same time he is a writer who always speaks of his own concerns, his private love pangs and personal questions, his parents' history and his own intimate secrets. Part of the achievement...