Poet

Ariel Zinder

(United States of America, 1973)

Biography

Ariel Zinder was born in 1973 in Berkeley, California, where his Israeli father was completing a doctorate. Both his parents were raised in English-speaking environments, and so Zinder, an Israeli who has lived in Israel since the age of three, who grew up in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and writes his poetry in Hebrew, is bilingual. He lives in Jerusalem, is one of the founders of the Ketovet Group, and has been publishing poems and poetry translations since 1999. A teacher of literature and creative writing for youth and adults, Zinder is a postgraduate student in literary studies, specialising in medieval Hebrew poetry. He has been awarded the Israeli education ministry’s prize for young poets, and the Ruth Negev award for his first book.

Zinder’s lyricism yokes Jewish texts, narratives, concepts and holidays to contemporary lives. Both the Tower of Babel and the Jewish celebration of the start of each lunar month are linked to lovers; the act of a child awakening from a nightmare to face the reality of a grown-up party in his home is compared, via an epigraph, to the presumed dichotomy between higher powers and the body. It is not clear whether so-called religious poetry – that is, poetry which employs religious imagery – is any more about religion, or spirituality, than other types of poetry (which, after all, often examine common issues of life and death). What is clear, however, is that Zinder’s knowledge of Jewish sources supplies him with a vast number of image systems through which to view our (extra)ordinary lives.

Bibliography

Books in Hebrew

Poems
The Ships of Tarshish, Carmel Publishing, Jerusalem, 2007
Ketovet: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose, Even Hoshen Press, Ra'anana, 2008

Translations
From Shakespeare with Love: Selected Sonnets (a bilingual presentation, illustrated by Michel Kichka), D.K. GraubArt, Jerusalem, 2000

Sponsored by POETRY PLACE

Poems

OUR ROOM WILL BE ‘ECHAD’ (ONE) BRICKS IRELAND, 1999 SONG FOR ‘ROSH HODESH’ TO THE WEAK, THE FEARFUL AND FAINT-HEARTED FATHER

Poems

Poems of Ariel Zinder

Partners

LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère

Ariel Zinder

Ariel Zinder

Poems

OUR ROOM WILL BE

‘ECHAD’ (ONE)

BRICKS

IRELAND, 1999

SONG FOR ‘ROSH HODESH’

TO THE WEAK, THE FEARFUL AND FAINT-HEARTED

FATHER

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