Between Sanctity and Sand by Yael S. Hacohen

A quietude lives in Between Sanctity and Sand—through Yael Shoshana Hachen‘s strong voice.

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An heir to Yehuda Amichai, Yael Hacohen is a young poet with an old soul, and her harrowing, war-torn lyrics bring something utterly fresh into American poetry—a shocked memory of military life, a desert consciousness that hovers between the sacred and the profane, and an awe-inspiring sense of poetry that is both ancient and new.  This short book is a gem.

–Edward Hirsch

What a revelatory and painful pleasure it is to read the fierce lyrics in Yael Hacohen‘s “Between Sanctity and Sand”; this formidable debut packs a punch, conjuring the terrors of war while retaining the tender humanity and intimacies of song.

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Yael S. Hacohen‘s poems conjure, with vivid, soul-piercing immediacy, the view from behind a soldier’s eyes, drawing on her experience as a commander in the Israeli military. In one poem, a young trainee feels the first awesome thrill of a weapon in her hand: “I could shoot like an angel./ I could hit a running target/ at six-hundred-fifty meters.” Terrifying moments are rendered as if in time-lapse photography: “After he shoots, you want to shoot back, but you didn’t/ put in the time. And now you can’t get your breathing straight.” The speaker of one of these poems even grieves her enemy: “Little boy, what could lead you to strap a bomb to your chest?” Hacohen neither shrinks from nor condemns war; she seek to comprehend it, to acknowledge its persistence. “Listen, even the olive tree/ needs to be beaten with a stick,” she advises, which is perhaps to say you can love your enemy and still not have peace.

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