It is Amichai's unique poetic voice that has proved so appealing through the years, a voice consistently in consonance with the spirit of his people and his times. Not merely contemporary in a topical or linguistic sense, Amichai has displayed a charm and a wit which have endeared him to both an Israeli and an international reading audience…. Though they are generically and stylistically varied, Amichai's works … reverberate with relevance and insight, with aesthetic challenge and enjoyment.

One of the most distinctive elements of Amichai's poetry is its disarming simplicity. In reading his poems, one often has the feeling of reading a diary without days, a record of someone's personal impressions or intellectual musings, set down at random. This perception is prompted by several of the poetry's central characteristics: the quasi-autobiographical voice Amichai often uses, the aphoristic nature of many of his lines, his patently casual, candid tone, and his way of creating sequence through seemingly disjuncted images or metaphors.

Two figures predominate in his poetry: the child and the lover. Both give rise to a tone of intimacy and innocence; both supply a resonance of sentiment and sensitivity; both seem temporarily well-protected and secure, insulated by parents' love and by lovers' passion. At the same time, however, they are obviously quite vulnerable to separation and loss. The child grows up, his parents are gone, the world and its wars are impassive to warmth and feeling…. One of man's basic struggles, says Amichai, is to realize that the "world" and "love" are not separate entities, that all are bound to recognize the ultimate ends of things, even of love itself. (p. 50)

However, Amichai's point of view is not really as tragic as it is sardonic, chiding, bemused. The poet's "I told you so" implies that whatever one's hopes and dreams, people are often turned emotionally into disappointed children or betrayed lovers, victimized not by oppressive social forces or flippant personal behavior but by the normal course of time and change….

If there is any philosophical message to be found in Amichai's poetry, it is that one is sure only of being and having been, never of where, how, or why one is going. But resisting both escapist hedonism and somber existentialism, Amichai's philosophy steers a middle path. A lingering despair combines with a sound sense of humor and a healthy appreciation of irony; the result is a kind of celebration of man's futile yet often amusing attempts to survive through intimacy and sensibility. Man is really a child lost in the world; the father he moves through life, the closer, paradoxically, he stays to childhood. As a man, as a mature creature in control of his being, he at best makes only dubious progress.

This central irony—the gradual recognition of essential changelessness along with the certain knowledge of time's unalterable advance—is evoked most poignantly in Amichai's elegies. In the famous "Elegy on the Lost Child," images of lovers, faces, landscapes and everyday household items such as doors, cups and chairs are presented in a slowly swirling, metaphorical spiral. (p. 51)

The real object of the search, "the lost child," is Amichai's symbol for all potential naiveté in pathetic conflict with the apparently fixed world order. At first the child merely appears to be "lost," but in the poem's development he becomes increasingly distant: he's "disappeared," he "cannot be found," and, finally, "he died in the night."… The paradox is highlighted structurally: the only real movement in the poem is the child's advance toward death. That, indeed, seems to be the motivation for the elegy itself. Yet it is not the child's death that is the source of tragedy. Far more than any so-called loss of innocence, it is rather an ambiguous adulthood that is mourned in this work. The very quest is an exercise in futility, for the fate of man-child is his transience. (pp. 51-2)

Related to Amichai's position as a major transmitter of the modern Hebrew poetic tradition is his deft blending of traditional and colloquial Hebrew diction…. Amichai's particular talent is his juxtaposing an obviously archaic phrase to one blatantly contemporary, much as he often blends the seriousness of dramatic situation with the playfulness of his tone. Sometimes the method is parody….

At other times, instead of twisting meanings, he obstinately presses for the literalness of a familiar phrase, in order to convey an ironic message. Such is his use of the opening line of the Yizkor memorial prayer in a poem which expresses the clash of the reality of human experience with the stock, traditional—and for Amichai, bitterly paradoxical—response….

A more humorous approach is evident in Amichai's play with colloquial idioms…. Amichai adroitly transforms the come-on line "If you've got the time, I've got the place" into

       We were together on my time and at your place.
       You offered the place and I the time.

The familiar phrase "the calm before the storm" becomes the ironic reverse:

       Now, in the storm before the calm,
       I can tell you things I
       couldn't in the calm before the storm….

Amichai's forte, however, is his extraordinary skill in the use of figurative language. Since many of his similes have a homey, "down-to-earth" ring to them, this aspect of Amichai's figurative language is generally responsible for the superficial labels of "gentleness" or "simplicity" which often describe his poetry in general. (p. 54)

Another major technique employed by Amichai is a chain-like series of seemingly disparate metaphors which actually links the poem's parts into a unity of meaning. In "God Has Mercy on Kindergarten Children," for example, the varied images presented are children of different ages, adults, soldiers, "true lovers," a shady tree, a man sleeping on a park bench, "we," and "the last coins of kindness" bequeathed by mother. The reader is forced continually to consider the connective elements of each abstruse image as it is added to the growing metaphorical design. Because of this technique, it may be said that many of Amichai's poems develop in burgeoning blocks of figurative patterns, rather than in direct, vertical lines. The reader must set these blocks in order, as it were; he must employ his own intellectual creativity to discover the common denominators of things which at first glance, at least, seem highly dissimilar.

Often there are sustained lighter sides to Amichai's works, particularly in many of his short stories. Though poetic in style and serious in implication, they are motivated by a dramatic, theatrical imagination which blends Kafka's grotesquerie, Agnon's dreamy surrealism, and Ionesco's absurdity. In "The Battle for the Hill," for example, a hurried army mobilization is presented in purposely disjointed scenes and dialogues. As the impending battle draws near, the dramatic and the verbal actions become chaotic. (pp. 54-5)

As in many of the poems, the humor and the aesthetic appeal flow from Amichai's talent for ironic juxtapositions in both phrasing and context. Since the entire narrative is really a fanciful expedition into plangent reminiscenses of war's disruptiveness, the battle never happens at all. The narrator-soldier emerges from the impressionistic scene of memory and ends up waiting for a haircut—a favorite image in Amichai's works for the passage of time and ironic change. (p. 55)

In the late sixties and early seventies Amichai seems to have become more sensuous in his writing, not casually or playfully, but rather in a way that suggests a personal hungering for self-insulation, an uncontainable need for immediacy and privacy. This trend is particularly evident in the "Achziv Poems" of his third collection, Not Just to Remember (1971), and is continued—with an emphasis on a tone of personal remorse—in his latest collection, Behind All This There's Great Happiness Hiding (1974). These later poems are characterized generally by a pronounced colloquial, far less figurative style; the rhythms are much more akin to casual speech than ever before, "live" voices, speaking in brief, poignant phrases, emerge from within nostalgic scenes or sentimental reflections. In the Great Happiness collection the mood is, for the most part, dejected, the voice partial to trauma, engrossed in sadness. This tone is especially pronounced in the post-Yom Kippur War cycle, "Songs of the Land of Zion Jerusalem," a phrase borrowed from the last line of Israel's national anthem, "Hatikvah" ("The Hope"), thus heightening the tragically ironic disparity between the long-standing dream and the crushing current reality. In these elegiac poems, which embody Amichai's responses to the Yom Kippur War, both the child and the lover are acutely vulnerable victims of the blind vagaries of conflict…. The message is clearly grim: innocence is surrendered practically before it is attained….

[There] is something in Amichai's works that makes him very Jewish, very Israeli, something beyond his kings and prophets, beyond his landscape and language: it is his resurgent response to his people's plight, his capacity for conveying the national grief as a personal elegy. Though fairly flippant in his early commitment, so to speak, to "things that really don't matter," Amichai has internalized the shock waves of the Yom Kippur War and admits to a searing speechlessness, to a forced renunciation of all insight—quite an anguished state of mind for a poet of such genius. (p. 56)

Warren Bargad, "Children and Lovers: On Yehuda Amichai's Poetic Works," in Midstream (copyright © 1975 by The Theodor Herzl Foundation, Inc.), Vol. XXI, No. 8, October, 1975, pp. 50-7.