But First I Call Your Name

"Hadassa Tal's poetry is a manuscript of pain and beauty. "How beautiful is all this beauty," she writes, "How will I surrender you to the ground." But the power of these poems is just that: they do not surrender beauty to the ground. They give it to the wind, to the water, to the dance, they elevate it "higher than the dome of thought", they sift through "the death from the death within." These broken poems create the "elusive miracle" that allows us to grasp what can not be grasped, to know what is impossible to know. Thus, throughout the pages of this book, they shift across states of matter and registers of language and voice, only to hold one tiny girl, "innocent of words," and to release her from the innumerable eyes that are reflected in the noting."
-Dana Amir