Esther Raab (1894-1981) is often touted as Israel’s first native-born woman poet, with the accent on her being native-born. That is, the fact that she was born in Ottoman-ruled Palestine, 52 years before the founding of the state of Israel, and her attention to the landscape, are seen as her defining features. She is celebrated as a nature poet, said to be reflecting the Land of Israel as the new Jewish context – almost as if she simply mirrored what she saw. Nonetheless, or perhaps because of this, she has often been ignored in surveys of Hebrew poetry: her work is missing from T. Carmi’s seminal Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse (1981) and from both editions of The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself (1st ed. 1965; 2nd ed. 2003), an omission rectified, of course, in the definitive anthology of women’s poetry in Hebrew, The Defiant Muse (1999). Raab, whose poetry is thematically daring and technically innovative, surely deserves close attention.

Mois Benarroch was born in Tetuan, (formerly Spanish) Morocco, in 1959 and came to Israel (“another planet”, he says) with his parents in 1972, at the age of 13. Fluent in English, Spanish and Hebrew, and in part self-published, he still feels like an outsider, but is accepted by the Israeli poetry community as an insider. He participates in national and international poetry festivals, and in 2009, he won the Israel Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature. He has worked in the hotel industry, as a naturopath, and was a salaried accountant for 12 years; he now devotes himself to writing. Benarroch is married to a dance teacher and is the father of three children.