Wallach's sexually voracious, semantically scrambled poetry burst like a dangerous phoenix onto the Israeli poetry scene in the 1960s. Through seven books and two decades, and still after her death in 1985, Wallach remained an admired innovator, one of the Tel Aviv school of poets who brought modernist experiment into Hebrew. Revising and very much expanding her earlier translation of Wallach (1997's Wild Light
), Zisquit finds an effective, if rarely subtle, panoply of English-language equivalents for Wallach's mix of compression, blasphemy and eroticism, which suggests a heretofore-unthinkable hybrid of Anne Sexton and Paul Celan: "When the angels are exhausted/ we fold their wings/ with pleasure with pleasure/ we raise the whip." Sophisticated rhetorical moves serve raw, sanguine ends, bringing the poems to the edge of psychopathology—and to the border of visionary prophecy: "in a state of love we didn't recognize our rules." One series flirts with its addressee in a parade of guises, among them a criminal and an incestuous daughter: "When you come to sleep with me/ wear a judge's robe/ I'll be the little convict." Later poems explore the same territory with greater confidence. The Israeli poets Aharon Shabtai and Peter Cole provide perceptive prefaces. (Aug.)
