Open Closed Open: Poems » (Reprint)

YEHUDA AMICHAI (1924-2000) has long been considered one of the great poets of the twentieth century. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Israel Prize, his country's highest honor. His work has been translated into more than thirty-seven languages. Winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

Amichai writes of the language of love, and tea with roasted almonds, of desire and love. Of a Jewish cemetery whose groundskeeper is an expert on flowers and seasons of the year, but no expert on buried Jews; of Russian shirts embroidered in the colors of love and death; of Jerusalem, the city where everything sails: the flags, the prayer shawls, the caftans, the monks' robes, the kaffiyehs, and young women's dresses. The poet tenderly, mischievously, breaks open the grand diction of the revered Jewish verses and supplications and suddenly discovers the light that his own experience casts upon them. Here, the bread of memory and the circuses of forgetting, nostalgia for God and a better world, dust and heat, and tamarisk trees that stand as flight attendants for the next millennium, saying,

"You can still get a seat on the third millennium before liftoff." Open Closed Open-poems at once meditative and playful, anxious and full of hope, sung in a language of biblical directness and meaning, that through the microcosm of the everyday give us the gift of the world at large.

About the Author:

Yehuda Amichai was born in 1924 in Germany and emigrated to Palestine in 1936. His work has been translated into thirty-four languages.

Virginia Quarterly Review

...places Amichai on the verge of a new religion - this collection its song of songs, our first sacred text for the new millennium.