In Hebrew poetry there is a poetic tradition of writing paternity.
Had all the love songs been collected, an anthology would have been created that, although not thick-bellied, would surely have included highly respected poets: from Natan Alterman and Tuvia Ribner to Roni Somek, Eli Eliyahu and Elhanan Nir.
The delicate and special book of poetry "Father Holds a Baby", the third book by Tom Hadani Naveh, an educational psychologist and poet, is definitely worthy of entering both this list and the same imagined fatherhood anthology.
In his new book, the poet flattens the experience of his fatherhood in three chapters.
The first is marked with the symbol (*), and includes pregnancy songs, from the father's point of view.
The symbol given to the episode is explained in one of the songs: "Between the Ultrasound Waves / Pulse Revealed - // Shining Star / Watch the Brackets".
The asterisk in parentheses is nothing but the fetus revealed to the father, while in his mother's womb.
The chapter is signed with the creepy miniature song, which binds together the elderly trio - masculinity, fatherhood and war: "Memorial Day / Ceremony for the names of the fallen. // Looking for a name for a baby."
The second chapter, which includes one cycle of songs, is marked with a symbol in which the asterisk seems to escape from the parentheses (*) - birth.
In this cycle of poems, entitled: "On the Drowning of Those Who Did Not Know He Drowned," birth is described from the father's unique point of view;
It is precisely the character who stands by the occurrence and does not take an active part in the act of birth itself.
The fifth song in the cycle, standing on the side allows a new look at the relationship between the mother and her baby. And immediately afterwards, in the next song in the cycle: "You join the world / As a clock to time. // For a hundredth of a second / You are the last to be born - / All life /
The third and final chapter, the longest and richest of all, is marked simply * - the baby is already out, as an independent entity.
In these poems the unique connection between the father and his baby is evident, and as in the other poems in the book, he too is drawn with a very delicate brush and in short poems, a mosaic of moments that shimmer and shine for a moment: " "Fruit-peeling for the peel".
The book's poems are miniature and minimalist, and most of them have a very clever pictorial language whose function is to make the experience of fatherhood accessible through creative and non-trivial images, which turn the stranger into a seller and the seller into a stranger.
Thus, as the closeness between the father embracing his baby is presented as the absolute connection between the fruit and its peel, the baby in the mother's womb, sized "as a checkbook," is described as a bank in which "loans double themselves."
It seems that the foundation of the action of foreign images, intended to explain the foreign experience, lies in one of the poems in which the pregnancy experience itself is the one explained to the father-speaker by his partner: "When he kicks / you say: / Imagine a foreign language."
Precisely such an unusual description, manages to convey in something, even to a man who is unable to recognize the experience, the miraculous feeling of the fetus in its mother's womb.
As mentioned, apart from the division into three chapters, there is no plot or prose development in the book - it consists of poetic crises that together constitute the experience of the new parent.
It seems that this is precisely why a table of contents should not be told, and in the end only a lexical key can be found, as in reference books.
At first glance the decision seems puzzling, but it becomes clear when one realizes that it is a one-of-a-kind book of poetry, which is nothing but a dictionary of paternal moments.
Thus, under the first "entry" in the key: "Dad", there are references to songs that include the verbs "collection", "writer", "hugging", "holding", "shaking", "anesthetizing", "falling asleep".
The technical key becomes a real key to understanding the book, in a completely different way from the table of contents, and it too can be read as a kind of poetry.
Tom Hadani Naveh / father holding a baby, with an employee, 65 pages
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