The Lightning of Reconciliation
An early review of an early volume of poetry by Chaim Gouri (1960): “Just how much submission, resignation and death are demanded from us daily in return for being able to rest, for having a home?”
1.
Chaim Gouri has given us his most mature work to date, from many points of view his best and most complete. It is not likely to produce the waves of warmth and solidarity that his earlier books did, but people who delve deeply into it, patiently, in a penetrating reading – absorbed like water – will arrive at the secret of his poetic utterance, providing more than just self-identification: self-revelation in a new light. Don’t think I’m trying to be clever, but Windrose seems to me to be an excellent novella about one of our generation’s heroes.
This book is quieter, smarter and wearier than Gouri’s previous ones, and perhaps those of other members of his generation. It is also more literary, for good and bad. Gouri’s poetic wisdom is completely exploited in this book, and then further adorned. The poet’s voice is restrained, his breath and speech are measured. In a metaphor from the art world, one might say that the colors are more limited but the tones have increased: shades, and half-shades. Gouri lifts a greater weight with a smaller effort. And the weariness teaches an important fact. It isn’t only that the volume of shouting has been lowered, but also that whining is obliterated. Sentimentality is suppressed by subtle tones which subdue pity.
The book’s excellence lies in its restraint. The series of poems “Twelve” reveals a new face of love, the drama and force of living as I-you, not in the accepted romantic framework before I meets you, but the much more problematic one that emerges afterwards. The poems begin with an achievement, an apparent conclusion: “Sign your name with your thumb./ And I’ll sign mine./ Here (are) the witnesses.” Further along the speaker reveals, with increasing tension, how sharp the struggle is to continue to meet, to be two together, to live: “There is a salty country of death between me and not-you.”
2.
It is easy to quote poems, series of poems, stanzas and lines from Windrose. But the book as a whole, taken as a unified work, raises an issue which may turn out to be of the utmost importance. At a party, after everyone had been drinking, it was said that the book should have been named Sadness of the Rich in contrast to Nathan Alterman’s Joy of the Poor. In Alterman’s book, the dead speak about the world of the living; here, in similar fashion, the living speak about the dead. There are many poems about old age, the autumn of life and its end. Poems with motifs of exile, the Holocaust, snowy moons and the chill of countries at the edges of ruin are not written from within, but from the heart of someone who approaches them from the outside, perhaps to offer succor or perhaps just to watch: a living being from the land of the living comes to visit the dead in the land of the dead. The poet testifies about himself that “I guard the walls of a city that died long ago”. His landscape, climate, memories and his love are all marked by a looking back, submitting, reconciling. A short and touching poem like ‘The Silence of the Sea’ serves as an anthology of Gouri’s early work, with the same early motifs of “You’ll go and you won’t arrive. Ever”, through the ships that return vanquished, and to the final, resigned verse: “In the end we’ll rest, our faces seaweed”. In the end we’ll rest. Gouri’s most recent book arrives just in time, and this is its importance, as the voice of an entire generation. Gouri’s generation, my generation.
Rest and home – these are the goals and aspirations of every war. So why are things so bad, so deadly, for the generation that achieved both rest and home? Have they not really arrived, but instead are temporarily seized by an illusion?
Windrose, which accepts the justice of rest and home, revealed to me, perhaps for the first time, just how much submission, resignation and death are demanded from us daily in return for them. This book, more than a dozen symposia on the condition of youth today, leads us to take stock. I am completely convinced that in this evil, nuclear world of ours, there should be no pity on civilizations but rather only on the life of an infant. The dialogue of father and son in “Poems for the Plagues of Egypt” is to my taste. “My father says the son, my firstborn says the father”, but Gouri’s book puts a first dent in this faith, now, when the poet reveals his true, sharp character as a hero submitting to silence, resignation, and to rest, and we are deeply shaken: he submits to death.
It turns out, the thought arises from reading this book and everything reverberating in it, it turns out that the life to which we so aspired, life for life’s sake, in the name of beauty and happiness, leaves us with only one certainty: death. The ability merely to live, to isolate life in its pure form, is the opening toward nothingness, toward the end. Just as in the past, in the days of the Joy of the Poor, during years of combat and victimization, the days of [Gouri’s earlier book] The Flowers of Fire, we knew that the ability to die was the real opening to life.
In Windrose, Gouri returns us to Ecclesiastes’ sadness of the rich.
3.
And there is something else about this book, not on the surface but revealed after many readings. Behind the alienated and deeply melancholic poems, behind the semi-mysterious landscapes, and the “garden of the weary” where one sits like a period at the end of a sentence – behind all these, a different kind of love flickers and burns slowly, a different kind of attraction which here and there allows the restrained, mature Gouri to break out of the jail of form, to whip out a true tongue of fire, licking the oxygen, treasuring the flame.
Suddenly, in the midst of a series of poems weary of a big town abroad, the poet cries out to his youth for his true love. And although in this cry of suffocated youth, the motif is of disappointment and weariness, the nouns alone and the melody alone of enamoured blood turn the motif of disappointment on its head and turn it into a motif of longing and the awakening of manhood.
I know that writers tend to pay a lot of attention to people who believe in the same things they do, but I’ll leave some of mine for Gouri’s next books. I don’t like to guess, but the poet has managed so beautifully to embed a deep and hidden love in this volume that I feel the fire rising anew out of his poetry into the beautiful world of our books in the days to come. A rose is also a flower, and the winds – their end is to fan the flames.
Translated for PIW from Moshe Shamir’s A Personal Matter: 35 Poets, Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 1987, 330-333
