The Poetics of Prophecy

Yosefa Raz is teaches in the department of English Literature at the University of Haifa, where she specializes the study of the Bible and its reception, poetry and poetics, and Romantic and contemporary poetry. She is also a poet and translator, with work recently published in The Brooklyn Rail, Boston Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

• Introduction: Prophetic Strength and Weakness; 1. Seraphic Choirs and Stuttering Prophets: Symmetry, Disorder, and the Invention of the Literary Bible; 2. Walking through William Blake's Irregular Bible; 3. The Myth of Primordial Orality and the Disfigured Face of Written Prophecy; 4. Ahad Ha'am's Mask of Moses and the Secularization of Prophetic Power; 5. Haim Nahman Bialik: The National Poet's Cup of Sorrows; Afterword: An Untuning.

'With high critical intelligence and the ear of a poet, Yosefa Raz illuminates, in comparative fashion, exemplary instances in the history of powerful strain of post-Biblical poetry. Her close attention to the texture and traditions of prophetic poetry, in well-chosen instances from the Bible to the past century, show us once again how compelling and urgent such poetry can be.' Ian Balfour, Professor Emeritus, York University, Toronto