[In the following review, Ramras-Rauch presents a brief overview of Amichai's major themes and praises The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai as "another occasion to enjoy the work of a poet whose complex simplicity continues to challenge lovers of poetry."]

Yehuda Amichai's simple, beguiling, and challenging poetry continues to fascinate readers and translators alike. He is recognized in Israel and abroad for his seeming simplicity of tone, image, and syntax. The centrality of a speaker in Amichai's poetry inevitable reflects the man himself: a gentle, often self-effacing man whose soft voice is frequently in contrast with the bold statements his poems make.

Amichai uses known and familiar materials for his poetry: the images of Jerusalem, his parents, his loves, his children, the marketplace—all act as a storehouse of raw materials for his verse. These familiar materials however, are often left behind when his poetry, without warning, soars into a new verbal reality where paradox, irony, and a certain wonder coexist. In a way, Amichai seduces his reader with his blatant declarative simplicity. The almost prosaic opening allows for a way into a more complex world. His world of analogies, metaphysical conceits, images, and paradoxes changes proportions while still using everyday imagery.

Among other things, is Amichai a political poet? Is there a hidden agenda under his well-turned verse? Are political issues alluded to in his innocent apolitical poems? Amichai's antiwar sentiment has been there from the inception of his writing. On a personal level, for instance, his basic experience in the 1948 war and the death of his close friend Dicky mark Amichai's strong antiwar feeling. In the short cycle "Seven Laments for the War Dead" from Behind All This a Great Happiness Is Hiding he writes: "Dicky was hit…. But he remained standing like that / in the landscape of my memory." The landscape of memory is but one resource for Amichai's warehouse inventory of images. Memory, time, history, people, smells—all float in his poetic orbit. Amichai is a perennial observer. As he says, his verse is haunted by hollow memories.

Amichai's poetry rejects his work as a guide to the perplexed. Love, a constant presence in his lyric work, touches on intimacy and his familiarity with the man-woman bond. At the same time, love is a concept tied to the Platonic idea of Love: Love that overcomes the physical, Love that transcends time, space, and causality. Amichai is bounded by the physicality of experience. Simultaneously, he aches to break away from the very matter that gives him his voice.

In this vein, in the attempt to transcend the expected and the causal, Amichai rejects a continuity of idea or stanza and opts for contiguity as a liberating mode. Simple words and complex notions merge. His poetry is strewn with road signs. The reader who is traversing the lines will, like a child in a drawing book, connect the dotted lines and thus create his or her own poetic map.

Amichai is fortunate to have had excellent translators into English—from Asia Gutman, to Chana Bloch, to Stephen Mitchell, to Benjamin and Barbara Harshav and others. The comprehensive selection A Life of Poetry: 1948–1994 appeared three years ago (1994). The current volume was first published in 1986 by Harper & Row. Updating that original, the present edition adds several excellent translations from Amichai's 1989 book The Fist Too Was Once the Palm of an Open Hand and Fingers, giving the reader another occasion to enjoy the work of a poet whose complex simplicity continues to challenge lovers of poetry.