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Even a Fist Was Once an Open Palm with Fingers: Recent Poems

Yehuda Amichai's career, in the biblical phrase, goes from strength to strength. Now in his mid-sixties, Amichai continues to write poems that have both extraordinary simplicity and subtlety, that bear both his common touch and his unique fingerprints, that manage to be both timely and timeless. At the same time, there is a deepening note in this selection made from his two most recent books in Hebrew, a more intense looking back and looking forward, a greater concentration on first things and last things. A man's soul is like/ a train schedule/ and a precise and detailed schedule/ of trains that will never run again. A man taking his children to the sites of battles he fought in, or seeing the expression of a former friend in the beautiful eyes of his daughter, or traveling through the changing landscapes and climates of Israel: these are the kinds of everyday experiences that Amichai transmutes into elegy and prophecy. Conversely, the complexities of his vision typically find precise expression in the homeliest of images, as when he associates his memory of a boyhood sweetheart who died in the camps with a lone, unclaimed suitcase on a conveyor belt at an airport that "returns and disappears again / and returns again, ever so slowly, in the empty hall..." Amichai's sensibility is like a great organ, enlarging whatever note or motif he strikes.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 96
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 978-0-06-096869-4
  • EAN
  • 9780060968694
  • Genres
  • poetry
  • Release date
  • 1991