Modest and Focused

June 08, 2009 When Shai Dotan’s first book appeared three years ago, reviewers were given pause by his traditional poetics, his tendency . . . to write under the influence or inspiration of established Israeli poets like Yehuda Amichai or Meir Wieseltier. The reviewers touched on the most prominent characteristics of his poetry – caution or solidity – that led him to be seen, on the one hand, as an apprentice-poet who wrote poems that were like footnotes or homage or echoes of the well-known poems of others, and, on the other, to write modest and focused poems that did not pretend to be disproportionately elevated or distanced, and exactly in this way succeeded in reaching the goal: good poems.

[Even two reviewers] who differed [in their opinions of Dotan’s first book] agreed that Dotan was a substantial poet, and also that the test he had to pass was originality [ . . . ]

And now Dotan’s second book is out, proving that both reviewers were right to a large degree. The new book contains less explicit homage to the poetry of others, but Dotan’s basic inclination remains as it was: to write self-effacing, highly attentive poems. My small contribution to the discussion will be to try to make a convincing argument that there is a third way of looking at Dotan’s work – not for originality, but beyond it.

Most published poetry books toe the line, and, essentially, imitate the work of others [ . . . As a reviewer] I look for the new and surprising. Yet I have liked Dotan’s poetry since I became acquainted with it. Why?
      
Here is a hesitant answer. Shai Dotan’s poetry hints at a culture different from the prevailing one: a calmer and slower-paced culture that makes no attempt to disturb tradition or reinvent the wheel [ . . . ] and, on the contrary, does the opposite – salutes in the direction [of tradition] and joins in, perhaps even to refine it further. This approach is much more widely accepted than is generally thought, and has motivated large numbers of good poets at all times: the desire to belong to something much greater than oneself, something that precedes us and will outlive us too. Furthermore, in the framework of the decades-long crisis in Israeli poetry, this approach [ . . .  ] has spread and increased in significance, not in order to rebel against the traditional in Israeli poetry, but to strengthen it, to try it out, and perhaps even make a small contribution to it.
        
What makes Dotan’s poetry stand out [ . . . ] is this straightforward awareness, at one with itself, to its own traditionalism [ . . . ] It is not rebellious [ . . . ] but an attempt [ . . . ] to find a balance between the need for sanity, that is, love, family, a reasonable degree of function in society, etc., and one of our most problematic, basic beliefs – in the centrality of the individual, and its limits and fateful isolation. Dotan writes all kinds of poetry: love and political verse, family and ars poetic verse, all of them repeating a fundamental pattern, which turns revelations of loneliness, of alienation, of barricading oneself in an inner ghetto or bunker, into a keen proof of our need for continuity, for bonding, for the squeaking hinges that connect us one to the other. Excerpted and translated from Eli Hirsh’s column, “Reading Poetry” in the “Seven Nights” culture supplement, Yediot Ahronoth newspaper, 3 April 2009, page 27.