Reviews

For sheer energy of imagination, for the constantly renewed sense of poetry’s ability to engage reality, Amichai has no close competitors on the Israeli scene, and perhaps only a few worldwide.
— Robert Alter, New York Times Magazine

The book emphasizes, as none of the others have, Amichai’s range — that he’s a love poet, a war poet, a citizen, and a historian, and not just on different days, but all at the same time.
— Matthew Flamm, Village Voice

Yehuda Amichai is by now one of the half-dozen leading poets in the world. He has found a voice that speaks across cultural boundaries and a vision so sure that he can make the conflicts of the citizen soldier in modern Israel stand for those of humankind. His wit is considerable: he can say virtually anything and give his words enough sting to defuse both sentimentality and hyperbole.
— Mark Rudman, The Nation

Yehuda Amichai is that rarest of modern writers, an ironist beyond irony. After all the delicate craftsmanship of his poems there remains a kind of manful literalness, a stubborn belief in the saving power of directness…. Here is writing that is fully the match for its onerous occasions. And as thelucky readers of this collection will learn, Amichai’s famous “spoken” language is spoken by nobody but Amichai.
— Leon Wieseltier

Yehuda Amichai’s splendid poems, refined and cast in the desperate foundries of the Middle East, where life and faith are always at stake, exhibit a majestic and Biblical range of the topography of the soul…. He is a psalmist utterly modern, yet movingly traditional.
— Anthony Hecht