Yili Shaner's book of poetry: Unhappy mothers Israel today

For many weeks the book "Ghelem" stood in front of me on the shelf of poetry books waiting to be reviewed in this column.

I read it once, twice and three times, and each time I read it, I recoiled from it and could not bring myself to write about it.

This, although it is a sensitive, smart, exposed and powerful book.

Perhaps the main reason for this is that the overwhelming majority of "Galam", the second book of poetry by the poet Yali Shaner, is dedicated to the experience of motherhood;

It has a collection of pregnancy and birth poems and poems describing parenting for little girls, but more broadly it can be said that it is a book about being a mother in the world (full disclosure: I am not a mother and I will not be, which increases the problematic nature of writing about the book).

However, there is a deeper reason why I found it difficult to write about the book: "Glam" is an "unhomely" book of poems, disturbing and unsettling.

The most appropriate image that comes to my mind is that the book is a kind of bat: silent, fragile and gentle, but at the same time also dark, gloomy, terrifying and ominous.

Yili Shaner's poems present motherhood in a way I have never read before.

So, for example, I think it is a good thing to do. I have to do it. From a distance, we will know: / our children are voodoo, and we have no / how to avoid it."

In fact, it is possible to find a better image for the experience described in the book than the image of the bat I suggested above, and it is the visual image chosen to decorate the cover, created by the Portuguese artist Fernando de Brito: a tapestry woven in two and a web of golden threads that is unraveling.

In the same way, the speaker is described, a whole being, which motherhood is slowly shaping.

Thus, for example, the song ", in which the spokeswoman meets a fresh (and perhaps fresh meat) parent:" I have to tell you. I have a good time. Becomes a predatory wolf, which may, perhaps, even devour her children.

It is possible to do so. Me and my daughters are dancing in the living room on her dummy / the fact that she has no daughters, this is a matter / not resolved between me and her."

The mother devoured the young woman she was before she had daughters.

Shaner's book certainly does not make any concessions to its readers, and reading it is demanding and requires great attention.

The mystery and subtlety of the appearance that appear on the surface of the poems in the book prove that Yili Shaner belongs to a special and old tradition of "witch poets" in Hebrew poetry, among them Hadova Hakabi, Nurit Zarhi and Rachel Halafi.

Thus, for example, it is a good idea to be "he said." 

Yili Shaner / Gelem, Pardes, 83 p.

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