Requiem

& Other Poems

27 May 2025

Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth.

Aharon Shabtai (Author), Peter Cole (Translator)

Description

Part kaddish, part lament, and a powerful call for peace, Requiem and Other Poems cries out for an end to unspeakable violence

Part kaddish, part lament, and a powerful call for stocktaking and peace, Requiem cries out for an end to carnage and slaughter: "The horror / the calamity / the disgrace, / the rubble of folly / and religion's stupidities, / the dimness of vision / and violence of despair / won't be repaired by an officer, / a bomb or a plane, / and not by still more blood. / Only wisdom of the heart could mend it... / only the gardeners of peace."Long one of the most outspoken Israeli critics of his government's treatment of the Palestinians, Aharon Shabtai is widely viewed as "the most important Hebrew poet of his generation" (The Boston Globe).

Reviews

"Shabtai has the red coal on his tongue." — The New York Times Book Review

"Considered by many to be the most important Hebrew poet of his generation." — The Boston Globe

"There is no one like Shabtai: an erudite classicist who writes poems of voltaic frankness and political rage." — Eliot Weinberger

"Translating the elemental moral force of Aharon Shabtai’s poems now, more than ever, provided both sentence and solace: sentence because his poems confront us in disturbing fashion with what we regularly turn away from; and solace because they’re powered by a hard-edged sympathy and inventive leverage that offer hope for what Hebrew, and poetry, can do--even in the bleakest dark." — Peter Cole

Paperback

9780811239318

132 x 206 mm • 96 pages

£12.99

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9780811239325

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