"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

"Agi Mishol, one of the most popular poets of Israel, captures the imagination and the heart of Israeli readers by observing common daily realities through a contemplative, sometimes meditative, perspective, negotiating the space between the mundane and the spiritual with a lively sense of humor. Having overcome such dissociations of sensibility, Mishol's poems are flushed with a flow of vitality and freshness. With no undue emphasis, eschewing declarative pronouncements, the poet points to the important truths looming behind the veil of the trivial. Avoiding opacity and heaviness of any kind her carefully chosen words, semantically loaded to the brim, also throb with reined-in musicality and elan. The current selection of Mishol's poems represents the latest phase in the development of the poet's work in full ripeness."-Prof. Dan Miron,