Overview

Part kaddish, part lament, and a powerful call for stocktaking and peace, Requiem cries out for an end to carnage and slaughter: ""The horror / the calamity / the disgrace, / the rubble of folly / and religion's stupidities, / the dimness of vision / and violence of despair / won't be repaired by an officer, / a bomb or a plane, / and not by still more blood. / Only wisdom of the heart could mend it... / only the gardeners of peace.""Long one of the most outspoken Israeli critics of his government's treatment of the Palestinians, Aharon Shabtai is widely viewed as ""the most important Hebrew poet of his generation"" (The Boston Globe).

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"Considered by many to be the most important Hebrew poet of his generation.-- ""The Boston Globe"" Shabtai has the red coal on his tongue.-- ""The New York Times Book Review"" There is no one like Shabtai: an erudite classicist who writes poems of voltaic frankness and political rage.--Eliot Weinberger Translating the elemental moral force of Aharon Shabtai's poems now, more than ever, provided both sentence and solace: sentence because his poems confront us in disturbing fashion with what we regularly turn away from; and solace because they're powered by a hard-edged sympathy and inventive leverage that offer hope for what Hebrew, and poetry, can do--even in the bleakest dark.--Peter Cole"

""Shabtai has the red coal on his tongue."" -- The New York Times Book Review ""Considered by many to be the most important Hebrew poet of his generation."" -- The Boston Globe ""There is no one like Shabtai: an erudite classicist who writes poems of voltaic frankness and political rage."" -- Eliot Weinberger ""Translating the elemental moral force of Aharon Shabtai’s poems now, more than ever, provided both sentence and solace: sentence because his poems confront us in disturbing fashion with what we regularly turn away from; and solace because they’re powered by a hard-edged sympathy and inventive leverage that offer hope for what Hebrew, and poetry, can do--even in the bleakest dark."" -- Peter Cole

"""Shabtai has the red coal on his tongue."" -- The New York Times Book Review ""Considered by many to be the most important Hebrew poet of his generation."" -- The Boston Globe ""There is no one like Shabtai: an erudite classicist who writes poems of voltaic frankness and political rage."" -- Eliot Weinberger ""Translating the elemental moral force of Aharon Shabtai’s poems now, more than ever, provided both sentence and solace: sentence because his poems confront us in disturbing fashion with what we regularly turn away from; and solace because they’re powered by a hard-edged sympathy and inventive leverage that offer hope for what Hebrew, and poetry, can do--even in the bleakest dark."" -- Peter Cole"

Author Information

An Israeli poet born in 1939, and an outspoken critic of his government’s treatment of the Palestinians, Aharon Shabtai is widely viewed as “one of the most exciting writers working in Hebrew today” (Ha’aretz). Author of twenty-three volumes of poetry, he is also the foremost translator of Greek drama into Hebrew. New Directions publishes J’accuse, which received the PEN Translation Prize, as well as War & Love, Love & War, and Requiem & Other Poems. Peter Cole’s most recent book of poems is The Invention of Influence, which follows his remarkable collection Things on Which I’ve Stumbled. His previous volumes—Rift and Hymns & Qualms—were collected as What Is Doubled: Poems, 1981–1998. In addition to his ND books with Aharon Shabtai and Yoel Hoffmann, Cole’s translations from Hebrew and Arabic include The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492, Taha Muhammad Ali’s So What: New & Selected Poems 1973–2005, Avraham Ben Yitzhak’s Collected Poems, and The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition. With Adina Hoffman, he is the author of a volume of non-fiction, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. Cole has received numerous honors for his work, including fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry and the PEN Translation Award for Poetry. He is the recipient of a 2010 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2007 was named a MacArthur Fellow. He divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven, Connecticut.

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