The first book-length collection in English of this major Israeli poet.
Finalist for the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry presented by the Jewish Book Council
from "At Your Side"
Years I walked at your side
like our prophet Isaiah
barefoot naked and bare
I will put on no cover
\nuntil you see me
\nuntil you recognize an other
one person
at least
and so know yourself as well
Mordechai Geldman came of age as a poet in the seventies, an auspicious and transformative time in the development of modern Hebrew literature, as poets and writers rejected the flowery, the hyperbolic, and the sentimental and opted instead for a more direct and intimate speech. While his early poems tended to rely on linguistic exploration, his vision soon turned inward, as he came to favor the simple, the true, the authentic. Geldman's poems are direct and accessible, touching on and revealing the divine and the sacred in the so-called mundane.
