Israeli poet Hed­va Harechavi, who died last year at eighty-four, spent the final decades of her life griev­ing the death of her son, Elisha. Migo, her lat­est book of poems to appear in Eng­lish trans­la­tion, is the sec­ond in a tril­o­gy that nav­i­gates the ter­rain of that loss. It’s also the poet’s nick­name for her son, who was only twen­ty-eight when he com­mit­ted sui­cide in 2003. ​“Bring back my Migo to me,” she pleads in the book’s penul­ti­mate poem (also titled ​“Migo”): ​“bring back my holy of holies to me / bring back my Urim and Tum­mim to me / bring back my beau­ti­ful child of eter­ni­ty to me.” Such insis­tent, incan­ta­to­ry rep­e­ti­tions crash across the pages of Migo. They punc­tu­ate Harechavi’s extra­or­di­nar­i­ly free verse and add up to a pat­tern of long­ing that runs through all thir­ty-one poems, cre­at­ing a com­plex por­trait of mourning.

Yet Migo is not sim­ply a book of bereave­ment. Its tonal range resists such a read­ing. Its poems, divid­ed into four sec­tions (“Migo,” ​“Till I Hear You Again,” ​“Now,” and ​“Death My Kin”), range from the painful­ly forth­right and pecu­liar­ly hope­ful to the escha­to­log­i­cal. Oth­er forms of rep­e­ti­tion give shape to oth­er­wise unbri­dled cathar­sis, as when Harechavi enu­mer­ates her son’s body parts one by one, scat­ter­ing her lamen­ta­tions across his eye­lids, his fore­head, his nose, his nos­trils, his teeth, his throat.

Lilach Lachman’s intro­duc­tion and notes illu­mi­nate Harechavi’s life and work. The poems them­selves, in Lin­da Zisquit’s exquis­ite Eng­lish-lan­guage ren­di­tions, appear oppo­site the orig­i­nal Hebrew. The book also includes a hand­ful of fac­sim­i­les – a real nov­el­ty in the age of the dig­i­tal word proces­sor. More than archival curiosi­ties, how­ev­er, Harechavi’s fit­ful, scratched-out, hand­writ­ten man­u­script pages man­i­fest phys­i­cal­ly what the poet­ry fails to express ver­bal­ly. They act out the parts that remain unspeakable.

In an unusu­al­ly focused poem titled ​“This Para­dox,” Harechavi con­jures up the image of a man who ​“resides for years in a one-room apart­ment, / at times sur­vey­ing spoiled streets, / rum­mag­ing in garbage cans, / find­ing among piles of rub­bish / cards and holy objects / and thou­sands of com­ic books.” What does this strange, seclud­ed man have in com­mon with her son? Per­haps noth­ing but his ​“unprece­dent­ed beau­ty.” And that may be enough: the line caus­es an uncan­ny qui­et to descend on the page. Here as else­where, there’s some­thing espe­cial­ly fit­ting about the expans­es of white space sur­round­ing the poem: the absences implied by such deep mar­gins mir­ror the absence of the poet’s son. The poems’ iso­la­tion, in turn, mir­ror her own.