Yehuda Amichai, a life of poetry, 1948-1994

by Yehuda Amichai

"Yehuda Amichai is widely considered to be the most prominent poet of Israel, and certainly the best known Hebrew poet internationally. A Life of Poetry 1948-1994 is an appropriately comprehensive and timely evaluation of the body of work of one of our most valuable poets in any language." "Employing the style and idiom of a post-Modernist - of a twentieth-century artist - and filtering it through the prism of his Israeli and Jewish sensibilities, Amichai's work is cosmopolitan, muscular, and ironic. Resounding with the exhilaration of the human drama - love, loss, death, war, eroticism, and the density of experience in human encounters - it is brought into sharper contrast by the ever-present precariousness of Israeli existence. The burden and legacy of this history, and its impact upon modern, secular society, places Amichai's work within a uniquely Israeli landscape - arid, verdant, cruel, and beautiful - while simultaneously transcending national and religious borders. His language