Collected Poems & Selected Translations

In a letter to Jacobs, the novelist Dan Jacobson refers to "your northern Anglo-Scottish pragmatical self coming down hard on your more emotional Jewish self". Emanating from the poet's explicit Judaeo-Scottish matrix are many fine English lyrics, poised and vulnerable, deeply felt and highly intelligent, locally grounded - Glasgow, London, Jerusalem, Madrid - and universally accessible.
This volume reprints his previous books and includes many unpublished poems - the fruits of two years' research among the poet's papers. The full notes prepared by the editors contain variants and other material of interest.
Jacobs was a distinguished translator of Hebrew poetry. The translation section reprints his books of translations of the poems of David Vogel and Avraham Ben-Yitzhak as well as a selection of his versions of Bialik and poets of a later generation, including Amichai, Carmi, Zach and Ravikovitch.
The book contains essays by the editors, John Rety and Anthony Rudolf, and by Philip Hobsbaum and Frederick Grubb. It begins with a foreword by Jon Silkin.