War & Love, Love & War: New and Selected Poems Format: Paperback

A rich, far-ranging, powerful selection of a lifetime’s work by the Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai, “one of the most exciting writers working in Hebrew today” (Ha’aretz).

War & Love, Love & War presents a poetic biography of one of Israel’s living literary masters, an artist whom the National Book Award–winner C. K. Williams has called “one of the most exciting poets writing anywhere, and certainly the most audacious.” The book moves from shockingly potent political poems to love lyrics that are as explosive and sometimes bawdy as they are tender; from early and stirring inventories of kibbutz life to a radically inventive midrash on (and paean to) the career and character of the Israeli right-wing leader Menachem Begin; from passion for justice to passion for a deeply mourned wife. At the end of it all is a prose ars poetica in which Shabtai discusses the method behind his marvelous madness. Peter Cole’s powerful translation displays the full and astonishing range of Aharon Shabtai’s oeuvre in a single volume for the first time in English.

An Israeli poet born in 1939, and an outspoken critic of his government’s treatment of the Palestinians, Aharon Shabtai is widely viewed as “one of the most exciting writers working in Hebrew today” (Ha’aretz). Author of twenty-three volumes of poetry, he is also the foremost translator of Greek drama into Hebrew. New Directions publishes J’accuse, which received the PEN Translation Prize, as well as War & Love, Love & War, and Requiem & Other Poems.

Peter Cole’s previous books of poems include Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (New Directions). Among his volumes of translation are The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition and The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492. Cole, who divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007.