The Great Tranquility: Questions and Answers

I picked up this little volume and began to read. I know Amichai's work in Hebrew and wanted to see how much came over in English translation. I was astonished. The poems are also tremendously powerful and moving in translation. He opens with a poem of commemoration to a comrade who was killed on the sands of Ashdod in Israel's War of Independence. He writes such a beautiful love poem to his wife Chana, a poem which subtlely remarks on the changing character of love with the years. He writes of meeting tourists in his holy city home Jerusalem, and how they looking for monuments do not see the real thing, the man, the poet with two - shopping bags in his hand on his way home from the market. Amichai is a poet of war and a poet of love. He is a poet of clear colloquial language and the very deepest feeling. Who reads this book will not only have tremendous pleasure, they will know the work of a truly great writer.

Yehuda Amichai is quite probably one of the last warrior poets. He is a veteran of three wars and has tasted the bitter fruit of human suffering and the loss of love. His knack for expounding both lament and spiritual awareness through his knowledge of the Tanakh are by all means, impressive. This book is a good introduction to some of his very straight forward and powerful work. His poems on war are meditations in remembering, litany's for a time gone by and not to be forgotten. Amichai fondles the human heart flwalessly, he coaxes it open with his soft words, there is nothing brash about his verse, it is gentle, like the soldier who picks up a refuge child in the field, softly so as not to impart the violence in his hands to the child now entering his embrace. A must read for any lover of poetry