Gethsemane

A collection of monologue poems by characters from the New Testament, viewed from the perspective of their Jewish background. Thinking his way back into situations depicted in the stories of the New Testament and what their Jewish legal and social context probably will have been, Atar Hadari places the voices of different characters, finding the tension between what the reality would have been and how such a voice would sound in today’s world. Echoes of today’s religious thought and language intertwined with the details of the past locate occasionally biting humour in these poems. These are the Jewish voices which often escape the gospel narrative. They do not mock the Apostles – they were human beings who were also there. They saw things which, as the android tells the bounty hunter at the end of Blade Runner, you would not believe. “The unheard voices of the past from the people around Bethlehem’s most famous son arise, and curl, and reach out bracingly into the present through Hadari’s pages. There is something visceral and strong, yet only hinted at, in these poems regarding the shadow side of connection between the Jewish faith and the Messiah they do not take.” —John Siddique “In his delightfully surprising dramatic monologues, Atar Hadari, who believes in miracles, accomplishes something miraculous, wittily yet respectfully recasting the stories of the Gospels from a Jewish perspective – and in one case from the perspective of a ‘poor donkey.’ His convincing portraits, limned in lively, musical lines, teach us that no human experience is impenetrable to a curious, sensitive mind, and that no single point of view can reveal all. As his ‘Doubting Thomas’ discovers, ‘There are some things you can’t own / However hard you grasp it’.” —Boris Dralyuk