A translated volume containing masterworks by an award-winning poet.

Sharron Hass’s award-winning poetry is distinctive for its ability to capture ephemeral moments in time, and Music of the Wide Lane evokes epic figures from Greek philosophy, the Hebrew Bible, and poetry. Her inspirations include Sophocles, Aristotle, the medieval Iberian Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens. Hass masterfully alters time and expression, lending an impression of perpetual change, as the past, present, and future intermingle.

Music of the Wide Lane explores homoerotic relationships, tense mother–daughter bonds, and the concept of light as a metaphor for truth and goodness. This remarkable fifth collection of Hass’s work includes an extended elegy for a dying father, two major poems from her previous work, and invites readers to expand their understanding of and appreciation for Hebrew-language poetry.

This English-Hebrew book features three dozen poems by the extraordinary Israeli writer Orit Gidali (b. 1974), a unique voice among her contemporaries. Gidali’s work appears to focus on the domestic, but for her, the domestic sphere is the stage on which the drama of the geopolitical is reworked on an individual scale. The domestic is always inhabited by the Other, who in these deeply personal poems appears in various guises: a Palestinian mother, biblical figures, the poet’s own deceased mother, and her husband’s first wife. Gidali creates a space in her world to imaginatively reconfigure the current political impasses of the region through a focus on relationship and openness.

Gidali’s poems, beautifully captured in English by Marcela Sulak, present a world beset by danger and uncertainty, yet they nonetheless cry out for community, connection, cooperation, and coexistence.