What is it to be human? The answer seems easy: human is what we are without trying. Only, perhaps, an environmentalist might answer: human beings are pernicious destroyers of nature. Or a war survivor might answer: human beings are cruel and violent and take advantage of each other. Perhaps we have to work a little to earn the sapiens in hom sap as the English poet, Peter Reading, ironically has it. Yet it is not so difficult. To be human is to say things like: " My thoughts are always polishing my childhood /
Till it's become like a hard diamond, /
Unbreakable, to cut /
Into the cheap glass of my maturity". Or: "The eyes of the sleepers are mines, /
the first light of day will set them off." Or: "You can hear the sound of bare feet /
Running away: that was death. / And afterwards the sound of a kiss /
Like the fluttering of a moth /
Caught between two panes of glass." Clearly, to be human is to have seen dark things and yet to be funny, tender, passionate and generous and to know that wisdom is sitting blindfold on your shoulder. Dr Johnson's definition of poetry was "What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." That, too, is a reasonable definition and might have been written with Amichai in mind. Yehuda Amichai who died recently is, in this sense, one of the great human - I was about to say humanist - poets. He is of the generation of post-war reporters and mythmakers to whom life was by way of an unexpected gift. He is of the first generation of foreign poets to appear and make a mark on the consciousness of European and English-language readers in the early 1960s. He is also Israeli, and of the generation of those admired early kibbutzim who acted as role models for the kindly anarchist elders among our teachers.
Ted Hughes, who wrote the introduction for this book in the form of notes before his death, and who, together with Daniel Weissbort, was the first to discover Amichai for the English-speaking West, tells us that the effect of Amichai's poetry on him was "to give me my own life, to open it up somehow, to make it all available to me afresh, to free me from my mental prisons." Hughes turned his mental prisons into myths of his own, but his poetry is very different from Amichai's.
Amichai's work is much more intimate. Hughes's vision of fate is dark and pitiless. Amichai's works through furious and fragile bodies. A man's soul, he says, "is experienced, his soul /is professional. /Only his body remains forever/ an amateur." He is essentially a poet of the body. The value of poetry is that it can give us back our own lives, so that we might know that being human might be a worthwhile enterprise. Amichai's is not easy, feel-good poetry - in many ways it is warzone poetry - but it does feel good, and it is good to be reminded that that feeling is available to us if we earn it. The best of his work (and there is a lot of his best) is a gift, a pleasure, and you don't need to be a poetry-reader to read him. So read him.
George Szirtes is a poet and currently TCD's first International Writer Fellow. His most recent collection is The Budapest File, published by Bloodaxe. He will be reading from his work in the Swift Theatre, TCD , at 7.30 pm on Dec. 6th.