The Center of the Flesh: Poems 1991-2011
Dory Manor started publishing poems in the early 1990s, and attracted a lot of attention even before his first book came out. Also his statements about Israeli poetry provoked stormy debates, because of his effort to return classical rhythmic and lyrical patterns to center stage, the rhyme and meter that Israeli verse had abandoned in the middle of the last century.The Center of the Flesh is a provisional collection of two decades of Manor’s poems. Into them he pours the materials of his life: childhood and adolescence; sexuality and love; life in Europe, especially Paris, and his return to Tel Aviv; his attitude to cultural heroes distant in time and space, as well as to friends and lovers. Erotic and homosexual elements dominate his work, and he examines the human condition through its affinity to them. As such, it is minority poetry, defiant of heterosexual poets, free in form and meter. And Manor also connects his homosexuality to his Jewish identity as two types of minority.
Dory Manor is both cosmopolitan and typically Israeli. On the one hand he follows the “great poetry” tradition, revealing a fine sense of musicality drawn from the French symbolists of the late 19th century and their followers. On the other, his poetics are adapted to contemporary reality and express a subversive, innovative and original quality.
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“Dory Manor is the most important poet of his generation. An extraordinarily gifted poet and translator, his work combines linguistic and rhythmic virtuosity with a highly complex emotional depth and a striking expressiveness.
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“Qualitatively … Manor’s poetry is no less that "perfect" … Like a certain kind of statuette, the physical smallness of his poems does not deprive them of the expression of greatness and drive possessed by sculptures in city squares and streets, expression that gives them their rhetoric and music, as well as the density of their psychological and philosophical contents … By virtue of its inner perfection and moral and esthetic integrity, Manor’s poetry opens a window in the home of Israeli literature and allows a different spiritual air to flow into the stuffy rooms … It will not be possible to close that window. .
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“A book that is a milestone not only for Dory Manor himself, but for Hebrew poetry as a whole … Manor’s musical magic is in the rhetorical clarity and the lightness, which are perfectly constructed … This alchemical music has now been laid before us, and our breath is taken away, in gratitude.
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“Manor’s poetic perfectionism enables him to write only a small amount of verse, but this small amount has the broadest of implications and it carries great literary weight.
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