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 i s 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