The poetry of sexual preference

 
it is impossible to talk about Hebrew poetry without considering Sheinfeld’s work, and the new voice he presents to contemporary readers. A broad range of subjects and themes may be found there, love poems and ones about parting, loneliness and sex, and affinity and alienation.
 
Sheinfeld’s poetry affords an opening into the life of a particular Israeli Gay man in a particular place and is at the same time credibly representative. His new volume of collected poems, written from 1975 to 2005, offers an exceptional, broad ranging document of proud Gay writing that is quite complex and very moving. In poem after poem, the reader is invited to become acquainted with different aspects of the writer’s life, his journey among places and men. Many of them.
 
Sheinfeld’s preoccupation with men is both understandable and necessary, his method intriguing. He is able to depict his desire to become a father (written before his twins were born) with the same passion he expresses for a good-looking young man glanced at the beach. The same poetic tongue with which depicts the verbalized body of a lover and his marvelous erection is also used in rather spiritual, nearly religious poems.

 
On the other hand, the 2013 publication of Sheinfeld’s collected poems [at the same time as a volume of work by another Gay poet, Yotam Reuveni] caused critic Eli Hirsh to contend that the heyday of Gay male poetry might even be over, although he hedges a bit:
 

Once, about 10 or 15 years ago, Gay poetry held a challenging and innovative role in Hebrew poetry. Reuveni and Sheinfeld are only two of a varied group of charismatic poets who began to write from the 70s to the 90s, [and] who gave homosexuality a prominent place in their poetry and in this way also granted it a prominent place in Israeli poetry in general.
 
It’s true that in recent years some interesting poets have written homosexual poems but still [my] feeling is that Gay male poetry has been marginalized at the same time that other self-emancipations in Israeli poetry – feminist, Mizrahi [Jews from Arab and other Moslem countries], religious and Lesbian – have been gathering steam and not a little prestige. Two questions immediately arise. Am I correct, or is this just my impression? And if I’m correct, what does this mean and why is this happening?
 
[…]
 
In a literary world addicted to questions of gender and ethnic identity and that encourages women poets to emphasize [their gender], Mizrahi poets to emphasize [their origins], religious poets their religion and so on, it seems that no one is encouraging Gay male poets [this way]. It may be that most of them even sense, consciously or not, that something about their homosexuality is foreign to the climate of young Israeli poetry published over the last decade in most journals, from [the alternative] Maayan to [the religious nationalist] Mashiv Haruach. It’s clear that no one opposes homosexuality, no way, but it is also clear that no one is hurrying to occupy themselves with the link between poetry and male homosexuality at the beginning of the third millennium. […]
 
A rereading of Sheinfeld’s work reveals him as the most devoted of contemporary poets to the subject of homosexuality, [and] most determined to shed light on the richness and complexity of homosexual sex. […] His words light up and his poems fill with beauty only when he deals with what really interests him – enlistment of the language and Hebrew poetry to lucidly express […] desire for men […] and love between men.