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Open Closed Open: Poems
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Open Closed Open: Poems Hardcover - 2000

by Amichai, Yehuda; Bloch, Chana; Kronfeld, Chana [Tr.]

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  • Hardcover
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Description

Open Closed Open: Poems, Amichai, Yehuda; Bloch, Chana; Kronfeld, Chana [Tr.]. Published by Harcourt, New York, 2000. First Edition. 208pp. Green boards with gilt spine titles. Volume is in fine, unread, unmarked condition. Unclipped jacket has very light shelf wear. Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) is recognized as one of Israel's finest poets. His poems, written in Hebrew, have been translated into 40 languages.
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Summary

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.

First line

On my desk there is a stone with the word "Amen" on it, a triangular fragment of stone from a Jewish graveyard destroyed many generations ago.

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Media reviews

“He is one of our great poets . . . once one has heard his quiet, even tones, precise, distanced and passionate, one never forgets them."-The Times Literary Supplement “Open Closed Open is the uncanny record of genuine inspiration. Happy is the man who has so much in his soul."-Leon Wieseltier “Poets have always talked reverently about unlocking the human heart, but when “I read Amichai I wonder who before him actually managed it."-Ted Hughes