Day-to-day life, philosophical issues of the meaning of life and death. Accessible. Gentle irony and original, often surprising imagery. Like many secular Israeli poets, he struggles with religious faith. His poems are full of references to God and the religious experience. He was described as a philosopher-poet in search of a post-theological humanism.
Play of sound. He "builds a strong momentum that moves in free association from word to word, the sounds virtually generating the words that follow in the syntactic chain through phonetic kinship."
"Rare ability for transforming the personal, even private, love situation, with all its joys and agonies, into everybody's experience, making his own time and place general."
Some of his imagery was accused of being sacrilegious. In his poem "And this is Your Glory" (Vehi Tehilatekha), for example, God is sprawled under the globe like a mechanic under a car, futilely trying to repair it. In the poem "Gods Change, Prayers Stay the Same" (Elim Mithalfim, ha-Tfillot Nisharot la-Ad), God is a portrayed as a tour guide or magician.
Yehuda Amichai was born in Wurzburg, Germany, in 1924. He emigrated with his family to Palestine in 1936. He later became a naturalized Israeli citizen. Although German was his native language, by the time he moved to Palestine, he read Hebrew fluently.
He served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army in World War II and fought with the Israeli defense forces in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Following the war, he attended Hebrew University to study Biblical texts and Hebrew literature; he then taught in secondary schools.
Amichai has published eleven volumes of poetry in Hebrew, two novels, and a book of short stories. His poems, written in Hebrew, have been translated into forty languages, and entire volumes of his work have been published in English, French, German, Swedish, Spanish, and Catalan.
Awards:
1957 – Shlonsky Prize
1969 – Brenner Prize
1976 – Bialik Prize for literature (co-recipient with essayist Yeshurun Keshet)
1981 – Wurzburg`s Prize for Culture (Germany)
1982 – Israel Prize for Hebrew poetry. The prize citation read, in part: "Through his synthesis of the poetic with the everyday, Yehuda Amichai effected a revolutionary change in both the subject matter and the language of poetry."
1986 – Agnon Prize
1994 – Malraux Prize: International Book Fair (France)
1994 – Literary Lion Award (New York)
1995 – Macedonia`s Golden Wreath Award: International Poetry Festival
1996 – Norwegian Bjornson Poetry Award
