SOURCE: A review of A Life of Poetry: 1948–1994, in World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 2, Spring 1995, p. 426.

In the following review, Ramras-Rauch presents a brief overview of Amichai's career and praises his collected volume A Life of Poetry: 1948–1994.

"Life is lived forward and understood backward." This dictum of Soren Kierkegaard can, in certain cases, be applied to an extensive work of a creative artist. Yehuda Amichai (b. 1924) has been writing for over fifty years; he is still a prolific poet. In his early years he wrote fiction (Not of This Time, Not of This Place, a novel, and The World Is a Room, a collection of short stories). In recent decades he has published his unique and seemingly simple poetic diction. Throughout his poetry the centrality of the speaker is manifested in self- and world-definition in an ever-moving constellation of binary relationships. His quasi-autobiographical speaker records the multiple and...