cover image Words in My Lovesick Blood: Poems by Haim Gouri

Words in My Lovesick Blood: Poems by Haim Gouri

Haim Gouri. Wayne State University Press, $24.95 (280pp) ISBN 978-0-8143-2594-0

Gouri is a major figure in Israeli cultural life. Yet his diverse achievements as novelist, journalist, documentary filmmaker and poet (he won the Israel Prize in 1988) have, until now, been little known in America. This well-chosen retrospective, drawn from the septuagenarian's 12 volumes of poetry (which date from the 1940s to the present), is a promising beginning to the reversal of that oversight. Rabbi Chyet, of Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, successively renders into English 85 pieces. At the end of WW II, Gouri, who had served in an elite unit that was the forerunner of the Israeli Defense Forces, joined the European mission to rescue survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, some of whom were themselves later to fight with him in the 1948-49 War of Independence. The inspiriting consciousness formed by Gouri's generation--""the culture of remembrance,"" he elegiacally calls it--poignantly resonates in this introductory collection. While never ethically boastful and more secular than religious in tone, Gouri's humane body of crisp modernist verse mingles learned references, Mediterranean sensuousness, melancholy and mundane colloquialism with biblical allusions, Hebraic traditions and a defining sense of the solidarity of a people ""born with a knife in their heart."" (Mar.)