The songs of the book "Light and Time", the fourth book of poetry by the poet and author Jonathan Berg, will not be read at high school graduation ceremonies and probably no one will send them on WhatsApp for a birthday.
Berg's book invites the reader to a completely different experience from that of most poetry books written in Hebrew at this time.
The style of the book is quite foreign to Israeli poetry and is somewhat reminiscent of Walt Whitman's physical and spiritual journey songs, or the wild and dizzying songs of Alan Ginsberg.
In long streams of consciousness, in wide lines and almost no punctuation, and in tangled and inconceivable congestion, the book offers a geographical and mental journey that oscillates between a variety of countries and countries, skipping - sometimes in the same song - between places like the Temple in India, the Dark Bar in South America, the cities in classical Europe And between gods compares Boranasi through the totem in Bolivia, through the church in Ethiopia to the Buddha in Burma.
In the first poem in the book, "Ithaca," Berg describes the backpack needed for the journey, filled with experiences from the East, the words of the prophets, drugs, gods, poverty, conflict, and family photos and memories from home.
Thus, as the dedication of the book, addressed to Berg's family, declares: "The house, the great journey."
Indeed, Berg's book is a great journey between home and abroad, between Israeli memories and inner-spiritual experiences, to journeys all over the world.
The book is full and very crowded: a mix of gods, landscapes, hallucinations and characters.
Almost every song is interwoven with place names (Lhasa, Potosi, Via Tonari, Srebrenica, Trastevere), gods (Ahura-Mazda, Shiva, Inti, Satan and Buddha) religious terms (Jane, Bnei Ambedkar, Stupot and Atman), names of historical figures ( Aung San Suu Chi, Paul Pot) and artists (Chatwin, Giorgione, Celan, Bishop, Kiefer, Pamuk);
The names of all these and others are embedded in the songs as they are, without footnotes.
This congestion in the book’s poems forces the reader to make an effort;
Lay down the book and use Google two or three times in almost every song, or give up the search and dedicate yourself to the experience, even without understanding everything.
The journey that the reader embarks on following the book's poems is not cheerful or blooming.
It also flashes the darker sides of the Third World - prostitution, drugs, poverty, violence and oppression.
However, a certain type of difficult experience reappears in several of the book's journeys, and originates precisely in the home - a post-military trauma that the speaker carries with him that haunts him to the ends of the earth, despite his attempt to get rid of it: "
Berg, who has also dealt with post-trauma in some of his previous books, describes it here as part of the thick mix of the book's journeys.
Thus, for example, she watched him in Cambodia: "Bar Battlepathers, Hakolads, Greasome Havdoly Garlades has a light pedestal, whitneled, waving ...] I hire the city of the Aven ...
In another place the post-trauma flipped from him in Vietnam, in the song of "Shock": " Marinon stinks My mothers are crying!
Negotiations are not with me!
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Yonatan Berg / Or VeZaman, Poetry Publishing, 83 pages
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