That Which I Thought Shadow Is the Real Body
Shimon Adaf’s image of a poet steeped in Western culture changed with this second book of poetry, where the center of gravity shifts to the local. The poet’s own life is more explicit, but it also undergoes a mythologizing process.
This collection has a complex, carefully planned structure through which Adaf engages in soul-searching and clarifies his complex attitude toward his childhood and adolescence, and towards his hometown Sderot, an outlying town in the Negev desert.
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“ Adaf is the most interesting poet to have sprung up here in a long time. ”
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“ Shimon Adaf’s poetry speaks lightly but with virtuosity, its language is complex but not forced, and wears its ornaments like a light and flowing garment... Beautiful, moving, and sounds like spoken music. ”
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“ We are stunned by Adaf’s language: spoken, flexible, new, edgy Hebrew, laden with the sounds of biblical language, yet also Israeli… This is a wonderful poet. ”