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
"Aharon Shabtai’s elegaic poems are all heart in Peter Cole’s magnificent translation. This is apoetry of the fragility of old age; a poetry of sorrow for a country whose peace he won’t live tosee; a poetry that serves Memory, the mother of the Muses. As a renowned translator of ancientGreek poetry into modern Hebrew, Shabtai has the epigrammatic touch, that way of chiselinglines so that the words ring in the memory. His long 'Requiem,' which specifies the dead bytheir names and an illuminating anecdotal detail, should remind us all that the smallestparticulars of a man or woman’s life are worth more in God’s ledger than any windy abstractionuttered by pundits, celebrities, activists and politicians: 'Before I fall asleep//GrandpaBeier/undresses//and leaves/on the floor//a large,/clumsy hernia belt//like a/horse’s harness.'" — Ange Mlinko
"Amidst the rubble, the haunted memories, the vengeful, the corrupt and the power-mad, in short, in the tragic maelstrom of this moment, how to mourn, what to celebrate, how to give voice both to the innocent victims of war and the 'disciples of peace'? How affirm a shared humanity beyond the limits of religious, ideological and territorial claims? These are among the fraught questions renowned Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai raises in this moving, late collection, skillfully translated by Peter Cole." — Michael Palmer
"Aharon Shabtai is the poet-conscience of Israel and one of the world’s great writers -- a fact forever established by Peter Cole’s first-love-in-a-second-skin translations. Here is Shabtai’s shalom-song, his goodbye, goodnight, and good luck to all that, a Requiem personal and political and tragically inextricable, ripped from the headlines as much as ripped from the heart." — Joshua Cohen, 2022 Pulitzer Prize
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