Review: "The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai"

In her study of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, Chana Kronfeld sets out “to reclaim … the poet for whom simplicity and accessibility are serious ethical principles, guidelines for a poetic effect and a verbal art that can be part of the fabric of everyday life”. Although Kronfeld acknowledges Amichai’s autobiographical poetics, she contests a still-pervasive tendency to read him in a narrowly confessional or personal vein and challenges the ways in which Amichai’s appropriation as a popular and national poet has occluded his commitment to a radical and revolutionary poetics. To this end, Kronfeld is invested throughout the book in elaborating Amichai’s “coherent yet open-ended aesthetic and ethical system,” and in so doing, bringing Amichai’s poetry to bear on the urgent concerns and issues of contemporary poetry and culture