Poetry International Poetry International
Poet

Dvora Amir

Dvora  Amir

Dvora Amir

(Israel, 1948)
Biography
Dvora Amir was born in Jerusalem during the 1948 War of Independence. Her parents came to Israel from Poland: her father was active in the Workers of Zion movement and her mother was an avid follower of A.D. Gordon, an advocate of Jewish agricultural labor. Following the 1967 Six Day War she studied Hebrew literature, Jewish philosophy and Kabbala at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During 1975 and 1976 she studied English Literature at the University of Illinois. Today she works at the Centre for Educational Technology in Tel Aviv where she writes educational programs on language and literature.
In Dvora Amir’s own words, “It is difficult to describe the poems. They write themselves and are simple, I hope.” Yet while she is interested “foremost in content,” her poems are skillful, revealing an imaginative world in which the past is woven into the present. Sometimes her poems are like “whispers against forgetfulness”, a way to “dull the pain of separation.” Often her focus is loved ones who have died; gathering precise and personal details, the “paraphernalia” of their lives, she brings alive the vanished world of her mother and the Polish-Russian immigration to Israel. Each poem is a question, an examining organism, with the bone and flesh of a human being suffering life and loss in quiet amazement.
© RAMI SAARI
Bibliography
In Hebrew:
Shirim doqumentariyim (Documentary Poems), Ha-kibbutz Ha-meuchad, 2003.
Be'ira itit (Slow Burning), Ha-kibbutz Ha-meuchad, 1994.
Sponsors
Gemeente Rotterdam
Nederlands Letterenfonds
Stichting Van Beuningen Peterich-fonds
Ludo Pieters Gastschrijver Fonds
Lira fonds
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère