"Love" and Selected Poems

Aharon Shabtai is the foremost Hebrew translator of Greek drama and the author of numerous collections of poetry. Born in 1939 in Tel Aviv, he attended the Tel Nordau School and the Educational Institute at Kibbutz Merhaviya. After his military service, he studied Greek and Philosophy at the Hebrew University, the Sorbonne, and Cambridge, and from 1972 to 1985 he taught Theatre Studies in Jerusalem. He was awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for Translation in 1993. The father of six children, he lives in Tel Aviv.

"In his fusions of the sensual and the spiritual, the ordinary and the exalted, the sexual in the suffering psyche and the intelligent consciousness searching and spinning through history, myth and layers of language, Shabtai is one of the most exciting poets writing anywhere, and certainly the most audacious. The poems have a wonderful almost vertiginous energy, an enormous erudition, and a startling, finally inspiring candor. A splendid book brilliantly translated by Peter Cole" – C. K. Williams

"Aharon Shabtai's poetry is of epic range: personal and historical, full of hard won knowledge and the sexual dramas the Greeks allowed their gods and themselves. He can be placed in a line that stretches from Biblical to Greek origins to Catullus to Joyce to Jean Genet and other masters of language, revelry, and revelation" – Stanley Moss