Article
The material book itself
January 18, 2006
I haven’t carefully examined the connection, if any, to the poetry within, but perhaps the painting expresses the lone artist’s process of creativity, whose melody one bears like a cross, passing through the Via Dolorosa and the nails until one comes to the blessed flowering, although the painting is open to other interpretations too. The book opens and closes with the same lines of the short poem “And so”: “And so/ I send you/ and you/ this finished book/ with love.” At the end of the book is added: “The fire within is blazing; Make me a shroud of water.” The poet prefaced these lines, twice, with a motto from Yosef Zvi Rimon: “My soul was thirsty for poetry.” In this way Israel Har saves a few lines from a wonderful and forgotten poet, one who apparently has no one to make something of his verse, as if it didn’t exist at all in the history of our poetry, due to the forgetfulness of poets.
Israel Har’s collection ends with a kind of colophon: “This book of poetry/ this concealment this revelation/ ends/ in the month of Tishri in the year 5576 September/ 2002/ here/ Tel Aviv.” I am underscoring these details because it seems to me that this exactitude, the painting, the repetition, the declarations and the bibliographic information, are inseparable from the book, and one must relate to them as parts of a whole. In particular the declaration in the colophon of “this concealment this revelation” gives an escape hatch to the reader, for the poet himself admits the incomprehensibility of some of his poems. And indeed much is incomprehensible in them, for it is a poetry that speaks through profound social codes and completely private beauty of breathtaking lines, only to find that they ended in a sudden stop at a barrier- an impossible sentence.
There’s nothing wrong with the poetry that conceals and is not transparent; on the contrary, sometimes you are overcome by the magic of the riddle and of mystery, in poetry which is not spoon fed to you. These puzzling poems, distanced by their strange and varied elements as a dream, are captivating, richly laden, filled with wonderful hints.
*The letters of the Hebrew alphabet have number values, and are often used to represent numbers, for example, in dates, but are not often used as page numbers in secular books- ed.
On Israel Har’s Garden of Ropes Amid the Fire (Tel Aviv: Keshev, 2002). Excerpted from Ha’aretz 19 February 2003
“This exactitude, the painting, the repetition, the declarations and the bibliographic information, are inseparable from the book.”
There is something about Israel Har’s new book that immediately invites the reader to voice an opinion on its unusual shape and structure. It is printed on paper with a yellowish tinge in an untypical font. And the elongated format, which I find beautiful, gives the poems room to breathe, on pages numbered in Hebrew.* The cover illustration was created especially for the book by the artist Yossl Bergner: three wooden poles stuck in a cliff overhanging the sea, against the background of an unsettled sky. A cello hangs on one of them, nails protrude from the second, and the third blossoms-- it is essentially a tree-- with two large red flowers prominent against the green. Roses? Lilies?I haven’t carefully examined the connection, if any, to the poetry within, but perhaps the painting expresses the lone artist’s process of creativity, whose melody one bears like a cross, passing through the Via Dolorosa and the nails until one comes to the blessed flowering, although the painting is open to other interpretations too. The book opens and closes with the same lines of the short poem “And so”: “And so/ I send you/ and you/ this finished book/ with love.” At the end of the book is added: “The fire within is blazing; Make me a shroud of water.” The poet prefaced these lines, twice, with a motto from Yosef Zvi Rimon: “My soul was thirsty for poetry.” In this way Israel Har saves a few lines from a wonderful and forgotten poet, one who apparently has no one to make something of his verse, as if it didn’t exist at all in the history of our poetry, due to the forgetfulness of poets.
Israel Har’s collection ends with a kind of colophon: “This book of poetry/ this concealment this revelation/ ends/ in the month of Tishri in the year 5576 September/ 2002/ here/ Tel Aviv.” I am underscoring these details because it seems to me that this exactitude, the painting, the repetition, the declarations and the bibliographic information, are inseparable from the book, and one must relate to them as parts of a whole. In particular the declaration in the colophon of “this concealment this revelation” gives an escape hatch to the reader, for the poet himself admits the incomprehensibility of some of his poems. And indeed much is incomprehensible in them, for it is a poetry that speaks through profound social codes and completely private beauty of breathtaking lines, only to find that they ended in a sudden stop at a barrier- an impossible sentence.
There’s nothing wrong with the poetry that conceals and is not transparent; on the contrary, sometimes you are overcome by the magic of the riddle and of mystery, in poetry which is not spoon fed to you. These puzzling poems, distanced by their strange and varied elements as a dream, are captivating, richly laden, filled with wonderful hints.
*The letters of the Hebrew alphabet have number values, and are often used to represent numbers, for example, in dates, but are not often used as page numbers in secular books- ed.
On Israel Har’s Garden of Ropes Amid the Fire (Tel Aviv: Keshev, 2002). Excerpted from Ha’aretz 19 February 2003
© Esther Ettinger
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