Open Closed Open

"Well, there were so many books I could have chosen. But I went for this one because a friend of mine, the brilliant young novelist Nathan Englander, introduced me to this poet when I visited him in Jerusalem a couple of years ago. They are the poems of an older man, about love and death and all the stuff that poets usually do. But he has bits and pieces about the insane struggle for Israel to exist and the history that led to its foundation. Let me get it down from the shelf and read you some. This is the first line from his poem called ‘The Amen Stone’. On my desk there is a stone with the word Amen on it. A triangular fragment of stone from the Jewish graveyard destroyed many generations ago. The poem goes on from there and he describes the chaos and what goes on with the stone. And then he comes back to the fact that the stone is sitting on his desk and calmly says Amen. He talks about resurrecting the dead through the mosaic jigsaw puzzle. The book flits in and out of Israel and at the same time has all the humanity and prophetic arrangement of word and image that is amongst the best poetry, so that’s why I recommend it."