Jehuda Amichai Book order

The largest English-language collection to date from Israel’s finest poet Few poets have demonstrated as persuasively as Yehuda Amichai why poetry matters. One of the major poets of the twentieth century, Amichai created remarkably accessible poems, vivid in their evocation of the Israeli landscape and historical predicament, yet universally resonant. His are some of the most moving love poems written in any language in the past two generations—some exuberant, some powerfully erotic, many suffused with sadness over separation that casts its shadow on love. In a country torn by armed conflict, these poems poignantly assert the preciousness of private experience, cherished under the repeated threats of violence and death. Amichai’s poetry has attracted a variety of gifted English translators on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1960s to the present. Assembled by the award-winning Hebrew scholar and translator Robert Alter, The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai is by far the largest selection of the master poet’s work to appear in English, gathering the best of the existing translations as well as offering English versions of many previously untranslated poems. With this collection, Amichai’s vital poetic voice is now available to English readers as it never has been before.

Yehuda Amichai's final poetry collection blends tenderness and mischief, infusing traditional Jewish verses with personal experience. Through themes of history, identity, love, and resurrection, he offers a reflective exploration of the human condition. This volume serves as both a meditation on life and a hopeful testament to Amichai's legacy as one of Israel's foremost poets, showcasing his unique voice and deep insights into the complexities of existence.

Yehuda Amichai was first brought to attention in this country by his inclusion in Modern Poetry in Translation (1965). The magazine's editors, Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes, here provide a selection of Amichai's poetry translated by various hands, placing his achievements alongside those other Eastern European poets with whom he was first introduced - Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub, Vasko Popa, Czeslaw Milosz and Andrei Voznesensky - while demonstrating what makes his own talent so unique.In Ted Hughes's words, Amichai was 'the poet whose books I still open most often, most often take on a journey, most often return to when the whole business of writing anything natural, real and satisfying, seems impossible. And that after thirty years of feeling the same way about him. The effect his poetry has on me is to give me my own life - to open it up somehow, to make it available to me afresh, to uncover all kinds of riches in every moment of it, and to free me from my mental prisons'.

A leading Israeli poet shares his thoughts about childhood, history, love, war, mercy, death, loneliness, and heritage