presents a poetic autobiography of one of Israel's living literary masters. The book moves from shockingly potent political poems to love lyrics that are as explosive and bawdy as they are tender; from early, stirring inventories of kibbutz life to a radically inventive midrash on the career and character of the right-wing Israeli leader Menachem Begin; from passion for justice to passion for a deeply mourned wife, Peter Cole's powerful translations display the full and astonishing range of Aharon Shabtai's oeuvre in a single volume for the first time in English.<BR><BR>"In his fusions of the sensual and the spiritual, the ordinary and the exalted, the sexual in the suffering psyche and the intelligent consciousness searching and spinning through history, myth, and layers of language, Shabtai is one of the most exciting poets writing anywhere, and certainly the most audacious. The poems have a wonderful almost vertiginous energy, an enormous erudition, and a startling, finally inspiring candor. Brilliantly translated by Peter Cole."---C.K. Williams<BR><BR>"There is no poet in English, or the two and a half other languages I know, like Shabtai. The Knowledge, the complexity, the terror, the loveliness is extraordinary, I praise him to the skies!"---Gerald Stern<BR><BR>"Aharon Shabtai's poetry packs a terrific wallop....He has the red coal on the tongue."---The New York Times Book Review<BR><BR>(b.1939) grew up in Tel Aviv and on Kibbutz Merhavia. The author of eighteen volumes of poetry. he is also the foremost translator of Greek drama into Hebrew. His J'accuse received the 2004 PEN Translation Prize for Poetry.<BR><BR>most recent book of poems is Things on Which I've Stumbled. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007