The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai / Edited by Robert Alter

Alter, Robert, ed., The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc, 2015.

The editor of this book, Robert Alter is an award-winning Hebrew scholar. He assembled this collection as the largest selection of the poet’s work to appear in English. It brings both untranslated poems and new version of Amichai's finest works. With this collection, an important poetic voice is now available to English readers. Amichai, who is one of the major poets of the century, is renowned with his moving, accessible, and vibrant poems. The poems in this volume are written in natural tone and universally acceptable, some are erotic; many are suffused with sadness and of course, with love. In a country like Israel, which has historical predicament of armed conflicts, these poems movingly yearn of the preciousness of private experience cherished under the endless threat of violence and death. Something that some of us, living in country like Australia, would take it for granted. "He belongs not only to Israel and to the Hebrew language but to all of us” - James Wood, The New Yorker.

More about the author, Yehuda Amichai and his complete works can be found here.

Sample of some of his poems can be accessed here.