“Robert Friend’spoetics are superb, and in that respect DancingWith a Tiger deserves a place on every library’s shelves.  For one thing, there is a great deal tolearn from it about how poets can manipulate the tools of their trade toglorious effect. For another, the reader can be deeply moved by the joy ofreading words that find magically reverberating echoes within other words, inmuch the same way that innovatively harmonized notes of music can bring onpowerful emotions…Technically one of the finest poets born in America, hedeserves recognition as such.”

                        LeslieSchenk, World Literature Today,September-December 2004

“Master to the end of his "own inner weather,"this collection of Robert Friend’s finest poems reveals a man who fearlesslyexplored the havoc and joy of his full life.  We marvel at the technical skill and range of experienceconcentrated in poems published for more than sixty years, together with thestriking poems of his last two years, facing death from cancer – with sorrow,bravery, and wit – at the height of his career.”

                                                            ShirleyKaufman, Jerusalem, January 2004

“Friend’scommon vocabulary, formal ease (with terza rima as well as free verse) andintimate tone make [the poems]…the distinctive utterances of a person one isdelighted and honored, even, to know.”

                                                RayOlson, Booklist, American LibraryAssociation, 2003

“The poems are straightforward, skillfulrenderings of daily existence, its pleasures, pains, uncertainties, andrewards, with echoes of Cavafy and even Housman—an excellentretrospective collection of the late gay American expatriate poet inIsrael,Robert Friend, edited with a keen and loving eye by American poet EdwardField.”

                                    CliftonSnider, California State University, Long Beach, 2003

“RobertFriend’s poems are approachable, easy to get to terms with, yet have depthsthat can be explored endlessly.”

                                                            K.M.Dersley, Tears in the Fence, #36,Fall 2003

Other Comments

“His is an openand song-like gift.”

                                                            RichardWilbur

“I wasaffected deeply by the lines to your mother, ‘The tide may sweep butcannot ‘whelm your breast, your continent of love must sweep it back.’“

                                                            MarianneMoore, 1942

"I do likeyour poems–they produce happiness, as real poetry does."

                                                            IrisMurdoch, 1978

“Found in Translation may be read simply as a connoisseur’srendition of gems of modern Hebrew poetry into English…As for Flowers of Perhaps, Friend’stranslations of the short lyrics of Ra’hel shimmer…All readers of poetry inEnglish should feel gratitude to the Toby Press for issuing these two handsomevolumes of Robert Friend’s superior translations from the modern Hebrew canon.”

                                                HaimChertok, from “Friendly Relations/Translations”

                                                Congress Monthly, May/June 2008

“[his] formalism andisolation had the efect of helping him to develop a unique and intimate stylethat could probably not have been constructed elsewhere, allowing

him to deal withsensitive, painful, and taboo subjects.”

                                                KarenAlkalay-Gut, from English Writing inIsrael, 2003 

“UntilRobert Friend translated his selection of Ra’hel’s poems, they had defied every attempt torender them in English. Now, because of his own ability as a poet and becauseof a temperament congenial to hers, his translations make it possible forreaders of English to understand why Ra’hel is so highly esteemed.”

                                                            YehudaAmichai, 1995

                        Prefaceto Flowers of Perhaps: Selected Poems OfRa’hel

“Thetranslation [of Flowers of Perhaps] manages to preserve much of the emotional

nuanceof the original. For Americans, this is a welcome introduction to a Hebrewgiant.”

                                                            SimonaFuma, World Jewish Digest, June 2008

“Jewish poetry fans who have not the timeto learn Hebrew rejoice, as Flowers of Perhaps has been masterfullytranslated into English by Robert Friend. Ra’Hel is a Russian Jew who was oneof the earlier movers to Palestine. Her poems speak of her times, an importanttime for Jews around the world. A bilingual anthology, Flowers ofPerhaps places both Hebrew and English texts side by side, and is certainto please readers who appreciate poetry with historical value.

                                                            MidwestBookReview.com,September 2008

“I considerRobert Friend one of the masters of modern American poetry. In his work, Irespond to a teaching that is beyond the individual poem but is implicit in allof it as a devotion, not just to craft, but to self-examination. His refusal totrust easily–feelings, language, or ideas–is almost religious, and is thebasis of the humor in many of these poems.  Since there is no question of denying the erotic, the poemscelebrate it, all the while exploring the bitter, exacting price. But thepieces are so playful and musical that we are charmed from any possible dismay,to recognize that these poems are truly about ourselves.”

                                                            EdwardField

“RobertFriend was an essential presence in Israeli literary life. He translated many

importantworks from Hebrew and Yiddish into English, thereby preserving the works

andmaking possible their availability to a larger audience. But not only wasRobert Friend

animportant translator and friend to many Israeli writers, but he was adistinguished poet

inhis own right. His work, often written in traditional forms, has sharpness andwit, an

emotionalexactitude that aims for the heart of the matter.”

                                                            RebeccaSeiferle, 2001

“If there wasany rank to which he aspired it was poet, and I use the word rank hereconsciously. For Robert this was the highest title anyone could achieve. Heturned toward it when he was a child with a certain purity of heart which henever lost, and remained faithful to it until the moment he died.”

                                                            LoisBar-Yaakov

                                                            “RobertFriend, 1913-1998”

                                                            Jerusalem Post, January 22, 1998

“In [his] poemsa scene is vividly set and a drama takes place in the world of you and I.  Two people do or do not revealthemselves to each other, loneliness is temporarily overcome or, sadly,recognized as the way things have to be. The drama in such poems is not sensational, but the crises are stormswhich give the acceptable social gesture a powerful resonance…Robert Fried isat his best when he reveals the comedy that links everyday experience to vitalpassages in one’s life.”

                                                            ZviJagendorf

                                                            “Itchersand Scratchers”

                                                            JerusalemPost, March 15, 1996

 “Robert Friend is a virtuoso whose voicein all its wide variety—loving, ironic, disillusioned, and witty—isunique among his contemporaries…This is a powerful lyric voice…At the same timethere is a continuing joy in love, a great erotic energy, expressed in poems ofelegant technical mastery and variety.”

                                                            RuthWhitman

                                                            Reviewof Dancing With a Tiger

                                                            TheJerusalem Post, July 26,1991

“Auden…ishis avowed mentor and Friend clearly belongs to that line of master technicianswhich includes Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht…his aphoristic gifts exceed, Ithink, even Auden’s. The vision is bleaker and the touch lighter…Friend isalways immensely readable, a poet of wit and tact and that underrated poeticvirtue, charm…Only when all the work is reissued, will we be able to take hisfull measure.”

CarolRumens

Reviewof  The Next Room

Jewish Chronicle, June 21, 1996

“The voicethat resonates through a wide variety of tones (lyrical, sardonic,

rumbustious,somber as night, wittily epigrammatic) and forms (from classical stanzas tofree verse) is quite unmistakable and consistently its own…Robert Friend isindeed a voice to be reckoned with.”                        Poetry London

“The pieces that tell of the poet’sawareness of the negative, sadder sides of man’s nature are…memorable.  In these…man is still capable of ‘theholy vision’.”

                                                            British Book News

“Wit is themachine Friend triumphantly rides; poise and precision, an accomplished senseof timing, and a verve which is controlled by the exercise of a critical tactare the evident signs of his technical mastery. His wit is not merely a matterof verbal felicity but a shaping force, molding a poem into being.”

                                                            H.M. Daleski

“Robert Friendis a poet of that indoors which is everywhere and which takes on a life, a neardemonic vitality of its own…he writes…with power, a wry knowledge andcompassion, and his familiar townscapes, his shutters and taps, his mirrors andclocks, and bird cages become the media for an intense and dramatic renderingof inner experience.”

                                                            RuthNevo

“Many ofthe poems…deal explicitly with sexual experience.  Friend is not bashful, and his poems have the courage oftheir convictions…But beneath the wry exterior lies a sensitivity that is oftentruly moving.  Some of the bestpoems…are those in which Friend allows his powerful sensuality to inform ratherthan to govern the poem…He has the confidence of expression of a Catallus andindeed it is the Roman poets with their bawdy, homo-erotic verse, grand passionand 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.”

                                                            JonathanWilson, The Jerusalem Post

“The urbanity and kindly humour of his poems….Behind thewit, the aesthetic distancing, there is a compelling narrative.”

                                                            The Jerusalem Report

“Sharp-edged and perceptive, with a nice wry humour”

                                                            NeilPowell, Gay Times

“Friend shows himself capable of both the tender and thesardonic as he

deals with repeated themes: old age and the approach of death, his Jewishness, the erotic.”

                                                             Glyn Pursglove, Acumen