Article
On Yudit Shahar’s first book
January 04, 2012
The rhetoric of Shahar’s poems is forceful, mainly because of her sharp speech. Her language moves over the surface of reality without stopping and without digging down too deep into the psychology of the self. It’s no accident that the best poems in the book are about society; in them she cries out against the injustices perpetrated against the lower socio-economic class in Israel, as in the poem ‘Bread’:
The day they cancelled the bread subsidy
no bird squawked
no chicken flew away
no cow lowed
the seraphim did not say ‘holy, holy’
the sea did not tremble
creatures did not speak
the still small voice did not say
“I am the Lord your God.”
This astounding poem raises goose bumps because of its sterility: a voice free of any marks of a self, of unnecessary romanticising, images or literary manipulation. It is transparent speech about the surface of reality which manages to move the reader without sliding into sentimentality.
In all her poems of this type, which may be called ‘social [protest] poetry’, Shahar’s language is sharp and precise: it doesn’t explain reality but rather uses a kind of ventriloquism, as in the brilliant It’s Me Speaking, in which Shahar speaks in the voice of a customer service representative. In this manner, exactly because most of the time we are not listening to those on the margins of Israeli society, the statements effectively condemn social discrimination and shake up readers who long ago turned their backs on such people, and preferred instead to become addicted to the opium of television’s reality show Big Brother. Excerpted from a review in the Haaretz Books supplement, 8 July 2009.
Yudit Shahar’s poetic language in her first book, It’s Me Speaking, corresponds pretty closely with real speech, and even takes this extreme step rather far: it is direct speech that argues, challenges and tries to change the speaker’s social environment. As someone who calls herself “a tough urban woman/ from the generation after liberation”, she moves through a cruel world that condemns her to postmodernist nomadism, that is, alienation and shifting identities that depend completely on her particular environment at the time.
She can be all or nothing, at one and the same time. In her poetry, she may be a vengeful goddess in a bar on Tel Aviv’s bourgeois Rothschild Boulevard at four in the morning, turn on the air conditioner on the last day of December and order sushi, or bed down with Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. On the other hand, she can represent “Mrs. No-one-out-of-the-ordinary”, feel the pain of Fatima, a young girl “banished from the only sidewalk on the block”, and describe herself without embellishment. The rhetoric of Shahar’s poems is forceful, mainly because of her sharp speech. Her language moves over the surface of reality without stopping and without digging down too deep into the psychology of the self. It’s no accident that the best poems in the book are about society; in them she cries out against the injustices perpetrated against the lower socio-economic class in Israel, as in the poem ‘Bread’:
The day they cancelled the bread subsidy
no bird squawked
no chicken flew away
no cow lowed
the seraphim did not say ‘holy, holy’
the sea did not tremble
creatures did not speak
the still small voice did not say
“I am the Lord your God.”
This astounding poem raises goose bumps because of its sterility: a voice free of any marks of a self, of unnecessary romanticising, images or literary manipulation. It is transparent speech about the surface of reality which manages to move the reader without sliding into sentimentality.
In all her poems of this type, which may be called ‘social [protest] poetry’, Shahar’s language is sharp and precise: it doesn’t explain reality but rather uses a kind of ventriloquism, as in the brilliant It’s Me Speaking, in which Shahar speaks in the voice of a customer service representative. In this manner, exactly because most of the time we are not listening to those on the margins of Israeli society, the statements effectively condemn social discrimination and shake up readers who long ago turned their backs on such people, and preferred instead to become addicted to the opium of television’s reality show Big Brother. Excerpted from a review in the Haaretz Books supplement, 8 July 2009.
© Yakir Ben-Moshe
Translator: Lisa Katz
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