“When we encounter a natural style, Pascal says, we are surprised and delighted, because we expected to find an author and instead found a man.”
“He is often ironic, but his irony is as generous as sincerity: he is always adding, not subtracting.”
“How not to love a writer who spoke often about making his poetry “useful,” who insisted that each of his books of verse in Hebrew should be published in the same handy format (ten by eighteen centimetres), so that they could easily be carried in a reader’s pocket? And how not to love a poet who has Amichai’s talent for hummable phrasing?”
“This talent for quick, memorable phrase-making is an art of the popular, and one that many poets, strangely enough, lack. It is an element of Amichai’s ordinary vitality, the current that connects him to contemporary songwriters and antique balladeers.”
“He has a psalmlike register, in which laughter is like grapes, eyes are like figs, and the poet recalls his father thus: “the rivers of his hands / poured into his good deeds,” and his mother like this: “I want to walk through / the deep ravines between her sobs.” More often, he makes joyous and strange analogies, stretching his similes into twisted lengths of elastic wit.”
“Amichai’s genius lies in how—to borrow from his own language—he makes metaphor “useful.” He thinks metaphorically, and in so doing he makes stories of them, treating his likenesses as if they were not metaphorical but animated literalisms. That’s why, I suspect, his metaphors have not merely poetic power but practical vitality, in the way that a horse is not only alive but usefully alive.”
“The reader without Hebrew fumbles among cleaned remnants; makes do with hand-me-downs. There are beautiful poemlike forms in this book (Alter, Leon Wieseltier, Mitchell, Chana Bloch, and Chana Kronfeld earn one’s particular admiration as interpreters), but I cannot judge them as translations. The line breaks sometimes appear, by the standards of English verse, almost arbitrary; so the reader shrugs and converts, happily enough, those poems into pieces of broken prose.”
“Alter is rightly celebrated both for his translations from the Hebrew and for his scholarship. His ferociously annotated versions of the Pentateuch and of the Psalms chaperone the Hebrew-less reader through many dense cruxes. Alas, there is no such help in this volume; the fairly sparse notes at the back do little more than point to well-known landmarks, and the reader keen to resolve lexical puzzles has to go elsewhere, to commentary by other scholars.”
“His poems have been called the nation’s “secular prayers.” He is quoted at funerals and weddings, in political speeches and ceremonies, in rabbinical sermons and in a Jewish American prayer book.”
“No contemporary writer known to me has written as searchingly and complicatedly about God and the ghost of God, and with such rich mixtures of feeling, such brazen anguish and play. Like Jerusalem (but more so), God provokes Amichai to describe and re-describe, shatters his language into splintered approximations.”
“These fruitful negations are the fated language of a man for whom God, like time, is always present and always gone. And these gestures and quarrels are more than the merely familiar struggle of the atheist who constantly invokes a God he does not believe in. Amichai does not believe in God, and does not want him back—but what has belief got to do with it, if (in the Feuerbachian sense) we invented him anyway? How to uninvent him? How to purge him from our grammar? Gods change, but prayers are here to stay, as the title of one of Amichai’s poems slyly has it.”