Songs of Jerusalem and myself

Since I rarely read poetry, I don't have a lot of context to evaluate this collection. Poetry seems to be as much about the feeling as the content, so I'll just concentrate on the impressions it left with me. Isolation seems to be a recurring theme in the collection, both external and internal.

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There is absence of psychological intimacy and a disconnect between thought and feeling. There is also a heaviness to the poems in the collection – the weight of the past and the heaviness of the present. The poems aren't particularly sorrowful, but there's a definite absence of joy. Most of the poems don't seem particularly religious to me, but religious imagery appears throughout the collection, as in “Sort of Apocalypse” which begins “The man under his fig tree telephoned the man under his vine”.

Yehuda Amichai was an immigrant to Israel, and I think that comes across in this collection of his poetry. There's a sense of being cut off from his past, of being in a different place, a strange place, a home that isn't yet home. Even though the English translation is very good and was awarded the National Jewish Book Award for translated poetry, I can't help but feel I've missed something by being unable to read it in its original Hebrew. I borrowed this from the library and liked it well enough to want to add a selection of Amichai's poetry to my personal library.

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