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“... more or less unavoidable cases is small, but the contagion is everywhere. The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai shows clearly, even through the medium of translation, that its author is among the small number in whom the disease was, if not congenital, at any rate not to be avoided by any reasonable precautions. From his earliest years he undoubtedly ...”

“... with the same aimlessness or vanity which leads him to pass off tentative jottings as whole poems. Yehuda Amichai, ‘Israel’s foremost poet’, roped in Ted Hughes in order to help with the translation of his vapid collection, Time. Was the idea that Hughes should make sure that Amichai avoided making a fool of ...”

“... that something can be saved from the wreckage. Else, how could he reprint his 1986 interview with Yehuda Amichai, in the course of which he artlessly explains how the entire confidence-trick was dreamed up by himself and Ted Hughes? I was starting a magazine, Modern Poetry in Translation, with Ted. The reason I started it was because Ted ... had come ...”

“... more resonant than the most grandiose rhetoric. In his introduction Carmi quotes from a poem by Yehuda Amichai (not included in the volume): The man under the fig-tree telephoned the man under his vine: ‘Tonight they will surely come. Armour the leaves, Lock up the tree, Call home the dead and be prepared.’ And Carmi comments: ‘The introduction ...”

“... that is the fateful uniqueness of language,’ he wrote. Only slightly younger Jewish writers like Yehuda Amichai and Dan Pagis – a fellow Bukovinan – emigrated to Israel and wrote their poetry in Hebrew: Celan couldn’t. It is what gives his poetry its desperate distinction. ‘There is nothing in the world,’ Celan said, ‘for which a poet will ...”

“... of Ireland, Spain and Norway is as important for us as that of Italy or France. The Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai, was making the same point when, in a recent interview with Tony Rudolf, he stressed the kinship he felt with such poets as Seferis and Montale: for too long our geography and our history have made us look at things in the wrong way, and by ...”

“... and they tend to become more than makeshift. Rose’s chapter ends with an evocation of poems by Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish that ‘allow something to rise to the surface, unsettling the surface boundaries of the world’. We see such unsettling perfectly in Amichai’s poem ‘Jerusalem’:We have put up many ...”

“... much holiness in the air’. ‘It’s sad to be/the mayor of Jerusalem – it’s terrible,’ Yehuda Amichai writes in one of his best-known poems. Another poem, ‘Jerusalem’, contains these lines: In the sky of the Old City A kite. At the other end of the string, A child I can’t see Because of the wall. We have put up many flags, They have put ...”