Promised Lands by Gili Haimovich

Gili Haimovich’s poetry captures an astonishing integration of place and emotion, with the same poem speaking to a breadth of moments and feelings. Which is why one can reread her poems so often over the years. It’s extraordinary, her way of capturing and startling the reader with observations and insights into a day, summing up the poignancy and the sufferings we endure – a wondrous ability to surprise and delight with these perfect observations of something you thought or would have thought if you had been able to formulate that thought but for you, it was more a vague feeling but then you read the poem and there it is, only it comes with a conclusion that leaves you slightly sucker-punched but in the best possible way, as if showing you a sharp-edged truth that you were not entirely surprised to find was there.

–Lisa de Nikolits, international award-winning author

It is of no surprise that readers from many nations celebrate, and find meaning in, the poetry of Gili Haimovich. Promised Lands, Gili’s longest English-language collection to date, beautifully represents her work as a poet in a language that she has adopted, or perhaps has adopted her. As a transnational, multi-cultural, collection, each poem captures the duality of the universal and particular. Gili’s speaker explores relatable complexities human beings navigate, no matter where we come from or long to be: home, immigration, language, love, and motherhood. The voice in the poems can be at once charming, cynical, sad, and humorous. One of Gili’s many fortes as a poet is to create space for the reader, and to invite them to share in the multiplicity of human experiences. In this regard, Promise Lands is a true achievement. As the speaker travels between Israel, Canada, India, and Estonia, weaving poetry out of the various people and places that she encounters, any reader will be fortunate to inhabit the “I.” Ultimately, the volume is filled with empathy for the self and others; as Gili writes in “Late Harvest,” “To harvest, retrieve, arrays of compassion.”

–Dara Barnat, Ph.D. and poet

Wry, quietly searching and alert, Gili Haimovich’s writing addresses the crises of life with an intelligence that is equally intellectual and emotional. Her poems turn on a dime to reveal the endearing follies of our neighbors and ourselves; their insights are unique and enduring.

–Fiona Sampson, professor and award-winning poet

In Gili Haimovich’s Promised Lands, we learn that “no one has ever reached the promised lands. / Yet we keep at it, marching toward them.” With strong images and resonant language, Haimovich leads us on this globe-crossing pilgrimage, braving drought and rain, as well as weather that is transparent and foreign, as we “wrestle with sand and faith.”

–Nancy Naomi Carlson, author of An Infusion of Violets