Hear O Lord: Poems From the Disturbances of 2000-2009 (review)

Bringing together poems from two of the poet's previously published Hebrew collections, this bilingual volume reveals a poet at a career crossroads. Unlike prominent Israeli poets Uri Tzvi Greenberg and Avot Yeshurun, who successfully advanced their ideological views through poetry without sacrificing their aesthetic strengths, Eliaz Cohen's promotion of his political views through poetry has distanced him from the understated tone and layered meaning featured in his best poetry. As a result, he needs to choose between continued poetic development and use of poetry for political ends.

With rare exception, Cohen's political poems prove to be unconvincing kitsch of potential interest only to those sharing similar views. Raised in the West Bank settlement of Elkana and currently residing over the Green line in Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, Cohen adheres to a National Religious ideology that views settlement of the whole of the historic Land of Israel as the pathway to redemption. Adherents of this ideology actively fought representatives of the democratically elected Israeli government during Israel's unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005, and, in a section of the present volume entitled "An Invitation to Cry: Six Poems on the Disengagement," Cohen passionately sides with these protesters and employs his poetry to convey their political sentiments. Yet, in these and other political poems in the collection, Cohen all too often selects ready-made metaphors rather than creating original ones to convey his emotions and experience and thereby dampens or deadens the impact of his poetry on non-partisan readers. For example, in a poem intended to express his anxiety about Israel's Jewish future entitled "From Poems of the Coming Holocaust," Cohen compares Israeli Jewry's future fate to that of the Holocaust's Jewish victims. He prophecies that if nothing is done the land's Jewish inhabitants will become "azure/ crystalline/ ethereal," like Auschwitz's incinerated Jews, whose essence melted away in the heavens together with crematorium smoke. Beyond its lack of heuristic value, this self-pitying comparison proves off-putting and tasteless due to its divorce from actual conditions in Israel/Palestine. Similarly Cohen repeatedly draws on the biblical story of the binding of Isaac for countless images intended to portray the lives of Israeli Jews as a ceaseless and frequently deadly religious trial. Binding and ram imagery pervade his poetry, and one must ask if this theme can be conveyed in a more original manner.

In contrast, when Cohen employs the minor tone dominant in contemporary Israeli poetry, he writes subtle and nuanced poems. Cohen's poetry on universal themes, such as parenthood, mourning, and love, displays a unique poetic voice drawing upon, but not imitating, the poetry of Dan Pagis, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Hayyim Guri, and Yona Wallach, whose work Cohen frequently alludes to. One can only hope that he continues to develop this part of his corpus, which is on full display in poems like "Ultrasound" and "From Me To My Uncle."

The short poem "Ultrasound " constitutes a captivating meditation on the wonder of parenthood and exemplifies Cohen's poetry at its best: "'And all the people saw the sounds'/ look, we do too: a tiny heart dancing in red and blue/ the spine a pearl necklace/ (or sun rays)/ five fingers searching/ and five more/ the sex organ is hidden/ (in any case we didn't want to know)/ something is trembling inside us/ wanting but unable to touch" (p. 45). In quotation marks, the opening line comes from the description of the giving of the law at Sinai in Exodus 20:14. The visual perception of sound referred to in this verse has long been understood as a cross-sensory metaphor intended to convey the wondrousness nature of divine revelation, something deemed absent from modern life. Yet the poem's title and its reference to obstetric sonography employing ultrasound waves to produce visual images hint that such wonder does not lie completely beyond human grasp. Modern Jews can visually perceive...