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DAVID HORNIK:
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The last angry man

Meir Wieseltier, considered the generation’s leading Israeli poet after Yehuda Amichai, has published 12 books of verse in Hebrew over the past three decades. Although individual poems have occasionally appeared in English translation in various periodicals, his English translator, Shirley Kaufman, has now produced a selection of his work in that language, containing both previously and newly translated poems.

And we’re fortunate that she has. Kaufman, herself a poet, does a wonderful job of rendering Wieseltier’s richly expressive, nuanced, allusive Hebrew into an American English so authentic and vibrant that many of the poems in this book sound as if originally written in it.

Wieseltier is an angry poet; anger is his keynote and his main energy source. He’s angry at piety and presumption, at people who believe in God or an afterlife, at the Israeli government for waging wars, at Israeli society for going along with them. He’s also very much a Tel Aviv poet: having lived in that city most of his life, its moods, sights, and sounds organically infuse much of his verse.

Indeed, the most effective poems in this selection are generally those marked by the most anger, raw energy, and sensory evocation. Thus, in I Ask Myself, an ironic hymn to anarchy that rejects all possibility of order or constraint:

a small
wind swoops over my shoulder, lifting
a huge pile of paper trash…
from nowhere in crazy
slow motion, heart twisting
across streets disappearing in the dying light
into the sewers…

The imagery is grimily urban, the energy enormous, the anger almost demonic.

Even more furious is Isaac, an appalling, powerful story-poem about child abuse in the office of a Tel Aviv driving school; or Take, a sort of nihilistic frontispiece to Wieseltier’s second Hebrew collection in which he invites the reader to

do violence to this book:
spit on it, kick it,
wring its neck.

But of course Wieseltier’s poems are not all negation and fury; beneath their surfaces are sometimes depths of wit, reflection, even tenderness. Take the exquisitely delicate Skywriting, a mellow, melancholy evocation of Tel Aviv at the end of Independence Day, 1972, that perfectly captures the after-the-party mood, the resumption of routine, the return of nighttime stillness:

On darkening balconies
a man and a woman, fiftyish, stand
in their pajamas assessing the evening.
…They don’t speak
or look at each other
as if there’s no common
language in this land.

Again presumption and piety, the specious grandeur of parades and speeches, have fallen — this time, though, not harshly and violently but into a deeper stratum of pensive brooding.

For Wieseltier, what gives the lie to all of it is death. Earth Thoughts in Summer Flow, a sequence containing some of his most resonant statements, has this passage:

It’ll be good if I die and you survive me.
Someone who hasn’t heard will come to look for me.
And you’ll say, but he’s dead. And he’ll ask, of what?
Then you’ll say: of his love
for the heaviness of earth.

His love, one might put it differently, for truth. In Wieseltier’s world, earth, death, and transience are truth, and the rest is high-flown twaddle; poetry’s anarchic task is to slough off conventional values and insist on the direct reality of experience, which includes the fact of death. Love between a man and woman can offer some respite, as in the tender Rainy Love; but even there the man warns his lover that

your dream of adjusting to me
will cause you terrible suffering
…in the end you’ll run away from me.

The persona of these poems is a man capable only of transient loves that fail; his only lasting allegiance is to his own darkness, "the heaviness of earth" and its expression in words.

It might seem, then, surprising that Wieseltier is in fact an "engaged‘ poet. Though he declares, in Pro and Con, that ’I can’t stand political poetry," the latter part of this book contains several acrid statements on the Lebanon war and the Palestinian conflict. The link, again, is anger.

However one reacts personally to highly opinionated poems such as Salt on the Wounds of the Land (on Land Day, 1976), To Be Continued (on the early stage of the Lebanon War), or Sonnet: Against Making Blood Speak Out (on Palestinian terrorism), it makes sense that a poet who regards his country’s religion as piffle and its patriotism as hot air would be disposed to regard its military ventures as folly and its conflicts as largely self-caused.

Which leads me to what I see as the central issue in evaluating this book. It’s not that some of its poems move me deeply, others seem to lack coherence and vitality, and others are in between, with peaks and troughs — it could not be different with a 172-page collection spanning several decades of a poet’s work. The question, instead, concerns the value of an overall message, a vividly felt impact, of negation and derision (tempered, again, by interludes of love and tenderness, and by a devotion to poetic truth).

I treasure some of these translations for their power and poignancy, but I’m not sure I’d recommend this book as a vitamin for people trying to survive physically and spiritually amid a many-pronged siege.