SOURCE: A review of Open Closed Open. Publishers Weekly 247, No. 13 (March 27, 2000): 71.

In the following review, Publishers Weekly offers a favorable assessment of Amichai's poetry collection Open Closed Open.

Constructing a lineage in which to place himself, Amichai begins these verses of personal and cultural history with a stone from a destroyed Jewish graveyard; and moves on to enact the story of David, recall poems by Ibn Ezra, and even consider Jesus as an instance of “Jewish Travel.” Within this vast context, the 25 longish poems of the collection, originally written in Hebrew, offer everyday acts of alternately joyous and somber reverence for God, “with the same body / that stoops to pick up a fallen something from the floor.” Amichai, who emigrated to Palestine in 1936 and is now 76, places imagined Holocaust memories (“I wasn't among the six million who died in the Shoah. / I wasn't even among the survivors”) adjacent...