"War Love Love War" opens with a scorching selection of recent poems criticizing Links of London countrymen's handling of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. It moves to Shabtai's early works from the s, with recollections of his kibbutz upbringing and interludes a biographical snippet of Menachem Begin's life, written in modernist verse filled with Talmudic and Kabbalistic allusions. It continues with poems of love, sex, relationships and loneliness explorations of human nature before finally closing with a scintillating selection of his most recent works, in which he mourns the passing of his wife. There are poems that are simple and lyrical, and there are complex experimental ones some are raunchy and even downright crude a few are gentle and quiet. Some recall the tone of ancient Hebrew prophets and yet others reference Greek bards Links of London Raindance Necklace whom Shabtai is a true expert, being Israel's award winning translator of Greek drama into Hebrew. For all of the collection's diversity, however, the poet is consistent in his recurring usage of shock treatment as a favored mode of engaging his readers. In the book's afterword, which is also a sort of ars poetica, Shabtai describes how "..facing an audience grown accustomed to being obedient, one wants to say, of all things, something annoying and critical, to get under the ,skin of what's respectable and, yes, enjoy the vulgarity of it and be a little wild." This tendency to be jarring works well in the context of author's bawdy love poetry. Yet this shock treatment approach is at its most vulnerable when it comes to the "war" poems that open the collection. For when Shabtai writes, in the very first Links of London Raindance Silver Pendant lines of the book, "These creatures in helmets and khakis, I say to myself, aren't Jews," it is easy to question whether he is writing these lines for the effect or out of sincere feeling. Is this the real pain, true and sincere rage against the system that he is describing, or is it merely subversion for the sake of being "annoying and critical"? Or worse yet Could Shabtai be feeding his poetic inspiration, vulturelike, with the tragic facts of the conflict? Such questions are inevitable for any poet who takes the risk of stepping past aesthetics and abstractions to delve into the realm of current political events. True motivation is bound to remain a haunting question mark in the reader's mind, but what makes Shabtai's links of london sale poems truly evocative is the ability to interject between rants, accusations and all too explicit fingerpointing certain deeply personal moments of visionary caliber. Thus, the poem "Sharon Resembles a Person" starts out trite and sloganlike It is as if the poet, in front of the reader's eyes, goes from being an angry shouting protester, to a trembling and tired man who can't get the mind off his country's plight even while shopping for potatoes.
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