The poems by Yehuda Amichai in Poems have been translated from the Hebrew by Assia Gutmann. Since I do not know Hebrew and since, even if I did, the text is not bilingual, my reactions to Amichai's poems are based solely on these often brilliant translations. Michael Hamburger admits to a similar problem in his Introduction:

Poems are made of words, and I cannot read the words of which Yehuda Amichai's poems are made, cannot follow—let alone judge—his way with the Hebrew language, what he does with its ancient and modern, literary and vernacular components, how he combines and contrasts them to make them talk or sing as they have never talked or sung before.

I wonder why someone who knows Hebrew wasn't asked to do the introduction. Anyway and in addition, German, not Hebrew, was Amichai's first language; his family did not emigrate to Palestine until 1936 when he was twelve. It is obvious, even from the translations, that Amichai has read both contemporary German and English poets.

     Sometimes pus
     Sometimes a poem.
 
     Something always bursts out.
     And always pain.

says Amichai/Gutmann in "Ibn Gabirol." There is very little pus in this book; instead, there are many poems burst in fruitful pain from Amichai's confrontation with the vagaries of the human condition. Most of the poems are short, just one page long, occupying space frugally but no less importantly for that. Take, for instance, this poem called "A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention."

     They amputated
     Your thighs off my hips.
     As far as I'm concerned
     They are all surgeons. All of them.
     They dismantled us
     Each from the other.
     As far as I'm concerned
     They are all engineers. All of them.
 
     A pity. We were such a good
     And loving invention.
     An airplane made from a man and a wife.
     Wings and everything.
     We hovered a little above the earth.
 
     We even flew a little.

In such poems, often in single lines—"I stroked your hair in the direction of your journey" or "Like the cry of paper tearing / Across the forty-two years of my life"—Amichai says it right, right there. This book is almost incentive enough to make me learn Hebrew.