SOURCE: "In the Great Wilderness," in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 11, No. 2, Fall-Winter 1983 and Spring-Summer 1984, pp. 155-68.

In the following review, Stiller praises Amichai as a poet who is representative of the Israeli spirit and tradition, but who also adds an air of modernity to the historical consciousness of his poems.

We recognize the speaker in the poem. His skin is leathery from long hours in the sun; he is rugged, muscular. He might be a farmer, but then again, he appears to have been doing something more abstract, going over accounts, say, someone else's as well as his own. In his mid-thirties, he has been through a couple of wars, many alarms. Though history is continuously knocking at his door, he has taken on a private life. He has a wife, three kids, an affair from time to time. He prefers to dress in a comfortable coat...