Amir Gilboa and Leon Stroinski are poets in settings of racial and national tragedy. Gilboa, honoured in Israel, translated here for the first time, is mainly confessional-less in a biographical or anecdotal sense than with psalmodic intensity. He shows a personal, almost childlike awareness of God. After a fall of rain comes a feeling of renewal. 'Well done, my Lord./O Lord, how close we've been.' To convey the atmosphere of his work imagine a voice speaking in the manner of an Old Testament prophet. He is confronting, with his people, two catastrophes- the Holocaust and the possibility of nuclear destruction. In the vision of silence after catastrophe he writes:

And distant. Everything distant. Everything
seeming calm. The rain will fall again
on smoking chimneys. And suddenly
a storm will rage in the rivers.

About Isaac, in the situation explored at length by Kierkegaard, he says wryly: 'Father father come quick and save Isaac/so no one will be missing at lunchtime.' Gilboa's thought ranges widely with force and energy, always disciplined and telling. And he can also surprise with a sort of Chinese irony: 'Finally I go to the man who sets traps for birds/ask his pardon for trying to stop his playing with the lives of others.' In the end he is fated to discover:

Suddenly with force comes the absence of force
Ah the absence of force is dryness . . . ...