It is dan­ger­ous busi­ness to invoke the name of a great poet in a poem – it can either come across as pride, earned or oth­er­wise, or it can send the read­er off to scan the pages of that giant. I found this to be the case when read­ing Howard Schwartz’s ​“Yehu­da Amichai in the Heav­en­ly Jerusalem.” As the title sug­gests, the poem is at once whim­si­cal and vision­ary, but it does not pull off this com­bi­na­tion near­ly so well as Amichai him­self did. While many of the poems in this col­lec­tion have the com­pres­sion and mar­vels of fables, I kept find­ing myself want­i­ng more – more risk in the lan­guage, more urgency in the lines. Dreams are a sub­ject of many of these poems, and while the uncon­scious can be a pow­er­ful accom­plice to the imag­i­na­tion, I often felt like I was read­ing a dream jour­nal rather than a col­lec­tion of poems.