Volume 47, Number 17 · November 2, 2000
Sentenced to Reality
By Anthony Hecht
Open Closed Open
by Yehuda Amichai, Translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch, by Chana Kronfeld
Harcourt, 184 pp., $25.00
It took Yehuda Amichai roughly ten years to write Open Closed Open, a suite of poems, or more truly, a long poem divided and subdivided into sections, but thematically and musically braided beautifully into something like symphonic unity and grandeur. It may be thought of as a brilliant enlargement of a major poem written earlier in the poet's career, 'Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela'; but whereas that was a moderately long poem dealing with much of the same materials, at least as they regard the poet's biography, this new work is nothing less than an heroic achievement of the spirit, a lofty and sometimes raucous meditation on the history of his nation, his faith, and his heart. As the earlier poem was not implausibly compared to Wordsworth's The Prelude,[1] which is subtitled The Growth of a Poet's Mind, Open Closed Open may be regarded as an account of the composition, the piecing together out of fragments, of the poet's soul. It is as deeply spiritual a poem as any I have read in modern times, not excluding Eliot's Four Quartets, or anything to be found in the works of professional religionists. It is an incomparable triumph. Be immediately assured that this does not mean devoid of humor, or without a rich sense of comedy. There is, in fact, an important ingredient of irreverence that plays a central part in the poet's deepest meditations.
Review, 3450 words
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