It all depends on how one looks at it. It’s either a blessing or a curse to be a poet in the Holy Land, a place with so much history, so much myth and religion. As far as Yehuda Amichai was concerned, it was like being ground between two grindstones, or like living next door to God. Every time he opened his eyes, the biblical past was there. Where once miracles were performed and prophets fell down struck by some vision, there were now traffic jams and crowded beaches. Tradition for an American poet is something one seeks in the library. For Amichai in Jerusalem, it came with his cup of morning coffee and the first look out of the window.
“Lovely is the world rising early to evil,” he writes in an early poem, because there’s that too. The endless cycle of wars, massacres of the innocent, and the inevitable despair that comes with it. What is amazing about Amichai is how levelheaded he stayed to the very end, balancing his philosophical gloom against a lust for life. Was there a greater love poet in the last century? I can’t think of one. “A psalmist,” Anthony Hecht called him. Even when he played the role of an amused observer of human folly, he praised left and right. His visions of happiness have a modest, human scale. White shirts and undershirts on the laundry line mean for now there is peace and quiet here.
Even when he was a young poet, he wrote about death. First-generation Israeli, born in Germany in 1924, immigrated in 1936, there was something unsettled in him, as if his parents’ migration had not yet quieted in him. His subject was always himself, poetry as an ongoing journal of one’s reaction to the world. Memory and forgetting were his constant preoccupation. Everything came down to that. The miracle that someone remembers, the unthinkable horror that we all forget. Amichai was a wise man who wanted to remind us of our hearts. The clarity of his poems is a testimony to his humility before the immense task. He wrote lyric poems because there are moments in every life that must not be lost. Who will remember the rememberers? he asked. We, who read and love his poems, will.
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From Tin House 2, no. 3 (2000).