Artikel
The Courage to Touch the Coals
18 januari 2006
This is a touching book, especially in its ‘failure’ to keep strictly to the point. Hebrew is not that kind of a language – it has too few words, and too few words without a history, that aren’t already loaded – to exhibit the patience of English, whose dictionary is ten times the size of ours and allows for aesthetic satisfactions in the choice of this word or that. And so, in the end, this is a hot book, even a fiery one, because choosing Hebrew words means choosing powerful ones. “What creates poetry? you ask . . . we’re talking about a lifesaving act, I say/ with the courage to touch the heat . . . ” This dialogue between a man and a woman, what I called the launching pad, can’t deal with our hyperactive linguistic world, in which words serve so many lying functions, and speakers insist on telling the truth. And then comes the ‘explosion’ of the poet’s answer to her partner in dialogue: the courage to touch the heat, the courage to touch the burning coals.
This is Amir’s second book; her first, Slow Burning, was published a decade ago. Slow Burning imported the best of metonymic poetics: the avoidance of enlargement, the circumvention of the political in the name of a proportionate relationship between word and language, between what language supposedly can do and what it can’t do. In contrast to this poetics, Amir brings to bear her own highly colored memories, hinting that she might have had a different career if her intellectual environment had been different: “In the Zikhron Yaakov cemetery, morning was like the end of day./ Cyclamen curls burst out of a stone. I held up a palm frond to defend myself from the rain. It was cold.” This was a long time ago. But she has difficulty restraining the body from the world she watches, and even though men without Eros have cropped up on the edges, she writes: “Why is it that only sorrow turns my attention to the body?” And these wonderful lines:
Death in our family does not begin in the Zamenhoff or Prozinin clinics
with a silent nod of the doctor’s head.
And it has no connection to one chance fall from a ladder . . .
It stands over us, blind,/ on one leg, as it did to Sarel.
It crawls elusive and evil between the toes.
In contrast to the political Israeli poet Dahlia Falach, Amir is not ironic. The television, for example, isn’t flickering in Amir’s house as part of the ironic poem’s scenery, as it does in Falach’s. For Amir, the television allows her to see what she otherwise would not – distant places, acts of horror. But Amir is aware of her poem’s behavior and the contradiction between her cold sight and the explosion: “We’re talking about a lifesaving act, I say/with the courage to touch the heat . . . ” The courage to touch this heat is the ability to sit and write a poem, which has no audience and no readers. People who are politically active don’t read poetry; at the university poetry is read through an Anglo-American prism which has nothing to do with generations of Hebrew poetry; and worst of all, why should people who are politically indifferent want to read a poem like this, written in Beit Sahur [in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories]:
And I know, there are sights that are not open to correction
an old man without hands waving empty sleeves in front of his face
a little girl searching for a notebook in the rubble.
And afterwards, the curse of women torn from the wall of their home.
There is undoubtedly a biographical element to the subjectivity of “I know, there are sights that are not open to correction”: a listening, seeing and filtering prism. Not everyone who writes poetry sees these sights.
Amir doesn’t wander in the midst of evil, can’t digest it, doesn’t permit herself to shout, doesn’t joke, and not at the expense of judges and corporate executives; it’s important to her to depict a gallery of the figures she has met, plain human beings. She is situated in a world where the tools she has developed to write poetry are no longer effective, and nonetheless, she insists on doing it, like a woman whose house has been overtaken by a flood. While everyone around her is panicked, she alone bails out the water, talking to herself and working.
Excerpted from a review of Amir’s Documentary Poems in Haaretz literary supplement, Friday January 16, 2004.
Amir is situated in a world where the tools she has developed to write poetry are no longer effective, and nonetheless, she insists on doing it, like a woman whose house has been overtaken by a flood, writes Yitzhak Laor about Amir’s Documentary Poems. While everyone around her is panicked, she alone bails out the water.
Dvora Amir’s new book is not only divided into two parts – poems written in Israel and those written during trips abroad over the years – it also contains sharp transitions dividing Amir’s launching pad – that is, her faith in the hard facts of any given situation, the desire to be precise, to stick to the point – and the take-off itself: explosions of images within the factual frame of the surface layer.This is a touching book, especially in its ‘failure’ to keep strictly to the point. Hebrew is not that kind of a language – it has too few words, and too few words without a history, that aren’t already loaded – to exhibit the patience of English, whose dictionary is ten times the size of ours and allows for aesthetic satisfactions in the choice of this word or that. And so, in the end, this is a hot book, even a fiery one, because choosing Hebrew words means choosing powerful ones. “What creates poetry? you ask . . . we’re talking about a lifesaving act, I say/ with the courage to touch the heat . . . ” This dialogue between a man and a woman, what I called the launching pad, can’t deal with our hyperactive linguistic world, in which words serve so many lying functions, and speakers insist on telling the truth. And then comes the ‘explosion’ of the poet’s answer to her partner in dialogue: the courage to touch the heat, the courage to touch the burning coals.
This is Amir’s second book; her first, Slow Burning, was published a decade ago. Slow Burning imported the best of metonymic poetics: the avoidance of enlargement, the circumvention of the political in the name of a proportionate relationship between word and language, between what language supposedly can do and what it can’t do. In contrast to this poetics, Amir brings to bear her own highly colored memories, hinting that she might have had a different career if her intellectual environment had been different: “In the Zikhron Yaakov cemetery, morning was like the end of day./ Cyclamen curls burst out of a stone. I held up a palm frond to defend myself from the rain. It was cold.” This was a long time ago. But she has difficulty restraining the body from the world she watches, and even though men without Eros have cropped up on the edges, she writes: “Why is it that only sorrow turns my attention to the body?” And these wonderful lines:
Death in our family does not begin in the Zamenhoff or Prozinin clinics
with a silent nod of the doctor’s head.
And it has no connection to one chance fall from a ladder . . .
It stands over us, blind,/ on one leg, as it did to Sarel.
It crawls elusive and evil between the toes.
In contrast to the political Israeli poet Dahlia Falach, Amir is not ironic. The television, for example, isn’t flickering in Amir’s house as part of the ironic poem’s scenery, as it does in Falach’s. For Amir, the television allows her to see what she otherwise would not – distant places, acts of horror. But Amir is aware of her poem’s behavior and the contradiction between her cold sight and the explosion: “We’re talking about a lifesaving act, I say/with the courage to touch the heat . . . ” The courage to touch this heat is the ability to sit and write a poem, which has no audience and no readers. People who are politically active don’t read poetry; at the university poetry is read through an Anglo-American prism which has nothing to do with generations of Hebrew poetry; and worst of all, why should people who are politically indifferent want to read a poem like this, written in Beit Sahur [in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories]:
And I know, there are sights that are not open to correction
an old man without hands waving empty sleeves in front of his face
a little girl searching for a notebook in the rubble.
And afterwards, the curse of women torn from the wall of their home.
There is undoubtedly a biographical element to the subjectivity of “I know, there are sights that are not open to correction”: a listening, seeing and filtering prism. Not everyone who writes poetry sees these sights.
Amir doesn’t wander in the midst of evil, can’t digest it, doesn’t permit herself to shout, doesn’t joke, and not at the expense of judges and corporate executives; it’s important to her to depict a gallery of the figures she has met, plain human beings. She is situated in a world where the tools she has developed to write poetry are no longer effective, and nonetheless, she insists on doing it, like a woman whose house has been overtaken by a flood. While everyone around her is panicked, she alone bails out the water, talking to herself and working.
Excerpted from a review of Amir’s Documentary Poems in Haaretz literary supplement, Friday January 16, 2004.
© Yitzhak Laor
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