About the Poetry/translations of Robert Friend

"His is an open and song-like gift."
Richard Wilbur

"I was "affected deeply by the lines to your mother,
'The tide may sweep but cannot 'whelm your breast,
your continent of love must sweep it back.' "
Marianne Moore, 1942

"I do like your poems--they produce happiness,
as real poetry does."
Iris Murdoch, 1978

Preface to Flowers of Perhaps:
Selected Poems Of Ra'hel
"Until Robert Friend translated his selection
of Ra'hel's poems, they had defied
every attempt to render them in English.
Now, because of his own ability as a
poet and because of a temperament congenial
to hers, his translations make it
possible for readers of English to
understand why Ra'hel is so highly esteemed."
Yehuda Amichai, 1995

"In Robert Friend's work, I respond to a teaching
that is beyond the individual poem but is implicit
in all of it as a devotion, not just to craft,
but to self-examination. His refusal to trust
easily feelings, language, or ideas is almost
religious, and is the basis of the humor in
many of these poems. Since there is no question
of denying the erotic, the poems celebrate it,
all the while exploring the bitter, exacting price.
But the pieces are so playful and musical
that we are charmed from any possible dismay, to
recognize that these poems are truly about ourselves."
Edward Field

"Robert Friend was an essential presence in Israeli
literary life. He translated many important works
from Hebrew and Yiddish into English, thereby
preserving the works and making possible their
availability to a larger audience. But not only was
Robert Friend an important translator and friend to
many Israeli writers, buthe was a distinguished poet
in his own right. His work, often written in
traditional forms, has sharpness and wit, an
emotional exactitude that aims for
the heart of the matter."
Rebecca Seiferle, 2001

"If there was any rank to which he aspired it was poet,
and I use the word rank here consciously. For Robert
this was the highest title anyone could achieve. He
turned toward it when he was a child with a certain
purity of heart which he never lost, and remained
faithful to it until the moment he died."
Lois Bar-Yaakov
"Robert Friend, 1913-1998"
Jerusalem Post, January 22, 1998

"Robert Friend is a virtuoso whose voice in all
its wide variety---loving,ironic, disillusioned,
and witty-- is unique among his contemporaries.
This is a powerful lyric voice. At the same time
there is a continuing joy in love, a great
erotic energy, expressed in poems of elegant
technical mastery and variety."
Ruth Whitman
Review of Dancing With a Tiger
The Jerusalem Post, July 26, 1991

"Auden is his avowed mentor and Friend clearly
belongs to that line of master technicians which
includes Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht. His
aphoristic gifts exceed, I think, even Auden's.
The vision is bleaker and the touch lighter.
Friend is always immensely readable, a poet of
wit and tact and that underrated poetic virtue,
charm Only when all the work is reissued,
will we be able to take his full measure."
Carol Rumens
Review of The Next Room
Jewish Chronicle, June 21, 1996

"The voice that resonates through a wide variety
of tones (lyrical, sardonic,rumbustious, somber
as night, wittily epigrammatic) and forms
(from classical stanzas to free verse) is quite
unmistakable and consistently its own.
Robert Friend is indeed a voice to be reckoned with."
Poetry London

"The pieces that tell of the poet's awareness of the negative, sadder sides of man's nature are memorable. In these man is still capable of 'the holy vision'."
British Book News

"Wit is the machine Friend triumphantly rides; poise and precision, an accomplished sense of timing, and a verve which is controlled by the exercise of a critical tact are the evident signs of his technical mastery. His wit is not merely a matter of verbal felicity but a shaping force, molding a poem into being."
H. M. Daleski

"Robert Friend is a poet of that indoors which is everywhere and which takes on a life, a near demonic vitality of its own. He writes with power, a wry knowledge and compassion, and his familiar townscapes, his shutters and taps, his mirrors and clocks, and bird cages become the media for Ruth Nevo

"Many of the poems deal explicitly with sexual experience. Friend is not bashful, and his poems have the courage of their convictions. But beneath the wry exterior lies a sensitivity that is often truly moving. Some of the best poems are those in which Friend allows his powerful sensuality to inform rather than to govern the poem He has the confidence of expression of a Catallus and indeed it is the Roman poets with their bawdy, homo-erotic verse, grand passion and biting wit, whom Friend seems to resemble most closely. 'The Practical Poet' is truly a classic. Witty, candid, painful and often moving, [his] poems deserve close attention. For all his cynicism, [the poems are] finally one man's celebration of life."
Jonathan Wilson, The Jerusalem Post

"The urbanity and kindly humour of his poems ....Behind the wit, the aesthetic distancing, there is a compelling narrative."
The Jerusalem Report

"Sharp-edged and perceptive, with a nice wry humour"
Neil Powell, Gay Times

"Friend shows himself capable of both the tender and the sardonic as he deals with repeated themes: old age and the approach of death, his Jewishness, the erotic."
Glyn Pursglove, Acumen

"Robert Friend (is)one of the finest poets writing in English today, whose work, unfortunately, is relatively little known in America."
Howard Stone, "The Poetry Doesn't Get Lost"
The Jewish News, October 29, 1965