Poetry
קמשונים
Not translated into English
Esther Raab · 1930
Synopsis
Thirty-two poems, mostly brief and untitled, almost without rhyme or metre, that follow one another without going anywhere. Their country is not a dreamed one but the one where the author was born: the thistles of the title and a host of plants named one by one, the sand, the land that is worked. The landscape is not a backdrop here, it carries the emotions that seethe beneath the surface. The language is frank and earthy, the punctuation sparse and entirely her own, and echoes of the Bible run through this secular poetry.
Context
Her first three poems appeared in June 1922 in Asher Barash's journal Hedim, who had urged her to write; the collection came out in 1930 from the journal's publishing house, under a title she had chosen herself. Her husband died the same year after an operation. She belonged to neither of the two schools of the moment, neither that of Bialik and his contemporaries nor that of the young poets gathered around Shlonsky, and claimed closeness only to Yitzhak Shenhar. The collection was reprinted in 1963 in her collected poems, which received the Kugel Prize the following year.
Who it is for
A slim collection, with no French edition. It is worth knowing that the author was born in the landscape she describes, which set her apart from the Hebrew poets of her time.
Prizes and reception
The first book by the woman called “the first sabra poet”, and the one of her collections that critics have studied the most.