Repetition and change are the basic elements of the self-periodization which marks Amichai's poetry. Basic images occur and recur, and time gives this process of self-mapping its added dimension and sense of personal reality. Paradoxically, time is both the connecting and disconnecting factor in the perennial dialogue which Amichai conducts with his existence…. On one hand, the growth of the speaker in the poems [of Time] is intrinsically connected to the landscape, the land itself, Jerusalem. On the other hand, time brings him closer to the personal landscape at the periphery of life's mainstream.

The sense of aging, death, the passing of generations, the prison of the body, the tyranny of memory, the thorns of existence—all these things haunt the poems. Life is experience in medias res. It is also a personal map with undeciphered signs—a source of enigma, doubt, self-mockery. (p. 330)

Amidst collected memories and...