The Great Tranquility: Questions and Answers

Poets have always talked reverently about unlocking the human heart, but when I read Amichai I wonder who before him actually managed it. This is the real biological substance-the most natural thing in the world, yet he makes it seem like a new thing in poetry... the undersong of a people. -- Ted Hughes

Yehuda Amichai is by now one of the half-dozen leading poets in the world. He has found a voice that speaks across cultural boundaries and a vision so sure that he can make the conflicts of the citizen soldier in modern Israel stand for those of humankind. His wit is considerable: he can say virtually anything and give his words enough sting to defuse both sentimentality and hyperbole. -- Mark Rudman

Yehuda Amichai's splendid poems, refined and cast in the desperate foundries of the Middle East, where life and faith are always at stake, exhibit a majestic and Biblical range of the topography of the soul.... He is a psalmist utterly modern, yet movingly traditional. -- Anthony Hecht

"Amichai has entered that small accidental, permanent company of poets -- Hikmet, Milosz, Vallejo-who speak for each of us and all of us by redefining our nobility, by speaking to us in his voice of many selves. In a time of vile politics and lost gods, Amichai continues to struggle with both in the midst of everyday life." (Stephen Berg)

"Two phrases, as I read through Great Tranquillity: Questions and Answers, occurs to me, both characterizing the book for me: "Consummate tenderness" and "Peace at last." The book is the man....The resignation we overhear in these poems, of consummate tenderness, of peace at last, is a triumph beyond loss and grief, towards an art moving and lovely to make one want to live it with the poet as a deep fulfillment of one's own." (David Ignatow)