As If I Knew the World before the Creation of Humankind

18 januari 2006 The atmosphere and poetics characteristic of the entire book are spread out before us meticulously in the opening section, ‘Geography Lesson’ [literally ‘Writing the land’], which moves among situations of suffering and violence, to those of madness, poverty and humiliation – the sights of everyday reality and those transmitted by the media which cross the speaker’s path abroad as well, but mainly here in this land, our land.

The book is a brave effort to deal with the ethical problem of maintaining our humanity in a cruel world without losing faith in poetry and in words, and moreover, without losing faith that words and poetry have a role in defending that humanity, as well as defending existential reality – home, landscape, stones. It’s a wonder that life goes on, despite death. As the book’s motto says, in the words of the Mahabarata, “What is the greatest wonder of all? Every day and every hour people die . . . but those who look on them will never understand that their day will also come, and they continue to behave as if they were immortal, this is the greatest wonder of the world.”

Everyone does this in his or her own way, the speaker by observing people and landscapes and works by writers from all over the world.

Our cruel and wild past is imbued in and involved with our present. But this poet does not get directly involved, doesn’t put her body in danger; she keeps the distance of a watchful tourist and notes down her precise impressions. Sometimes she cries, agitated by what she sees, reporting in plain and direct language.

‘Ballad for an old Palestinian’, which depicts mourning and pain, is perhaps one of the strongest poems. Something in an old man’s tragic fate turns him into a metonym for this tormented nation, for the mute contingent which bears its suffering: the face of the Other arousing sympathy and emotions we aren’t used to feeling for people who are considered the enemy. The old man is crossing his fields, looking toward the roof of his house and to the skies surrounded by the beauty and spaciousness of nature, but the three opening (and closing) lines of the ballad presage disaster: “The soul is a black forest/ the soul is a stone balancing a bucket over a well/ dangling between two worlds.” An explanation of these lines may be found in the middle of the poem: “Today it became known in the hills – his grandson was shot,/ his body jolted on a plastic sheet/ stretched over a bed of twigs.” Unaccompanied by wails or shouts for vengeance but just a merciful silence turned in on its pain, this poem has even more presence; it is dense and moving, and preferable, in my eyes to other poems which are more strictly documentary in style.

The factual tone of reportage governs even in poems like ‘Portrait of a Day’. Israeli reality, a civilization on the verge of the third millennium, [is represented] in a not very densely packed bundle, linguistically speaking, free of metaphor and compact indeed.

Poems about journeys to faraway places seem to be in a different category, but they aren’t real journeys, rather ones that are mediated through postcards or old photos, a painting or a film. These are included in the section ‘Documentary Poems’, and, paradoxically, they avoid dry and documentary formulations, seen instead from the complacent stance of the watchful tourist, and crossing the boundaries between reality and hallucination, mixing up the laws of time and space.

The final section, ‘Pessoa and others’, deserves attention. The entire book is filled with references to ‘foreign’ works and cultures, which the poet brings closer to us and to herself. In ‘A letter to Fernando Pessoa’ she says, “I am writing to tell you that you and all the ‘I’s’ you invented/ are alive and still rambling the streets of Lisbon.” There are also poems dedicated to Flannery O’Connor, Zbigniew Herbert, [Israeli painter] Avraham Ofek, and to [Israeli poet] David Avidan, in a wonderful poem in which she tries to converse with his ghost – Avidan was known to favor talking with the spirits of the dead in séances.

I’d like to end by citing a brave and uncharacteristic poem, which almost seems to stand in opposition to these poems of documentation and memory – ‘Pointless’. For some time this ‘pointless’ deed was for me the main purpose of poetry:

I wanted to do something pointless
(except for my wanting it, which is of course the point).
I entered the open conch of my eyeglass case . . .
My eyes slowly grew used to the dark
and it was warm and pleasant
and I asked myself why I should leave
for what purpose?




Excerpted from a review in the Haaretz book supplement, Wednesday January 19, 2004.