I have one selfish quibble with the expansive, magnificent new book “The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai,” edited by Robert Alter. It excludes a personal favorite, “The Eve of Rosh Hashanah.” Every year, on the occasion of its title, I read the poem aloud. In Chana Bloch and Stephen ­Mitchell’s translation, it begins:

The eve of Rosh Hashanah. At the house that’s being built,

a man makes a vow: not to do anything wrong in it,

only to love.

— and ends:

And whoever uses people as handles or as rungs of a ladder

will soon find himself hugging a stick of wood

and holding a severed hand and wiping his tears

with a potsherd.

I share it with my family and my friends, Jews and non-Jews, poetry lovers and those who have made their distaste for poetry known. I often share poems I love, but nothing ever gets a response as enthusiastic as “The Eve of Rosh Hashanah” does. It reminds us — because Amichai knew we sometimes need reminding — to treat one another with decency and care; to love, not to exploit. It is useful, and usefulness mattered to Amichai. Chana ­Kron­feld, in her penetrating new monograph on the poet, THE FULL ­SEVERITY OF COMPASSION (Stanford University, $55), quotes him:

“ ‘The main thing is to be useful,’ ­Amichai would often say. . . . Providing useful ­poetry was indeed something he was always proud of, especially when it was ordinary human beings, not the mechanisms of state or institutional religion, that would find some practical application for his words.”

Amichai was so famous in Israel that, as Mel Gussow wrote in his 2000 New York Times obituary, “walking in Jerusalem, his home for many years, he would be recognized and accorded the attention that in the United States might be reserved for a movie star or athlete.” Both Alter and Kron­feld (many of her translations, with Chana Bloch, also appear in Alter’s book) disclose a deep concern about the peculiar burden of Amichai’s popularity in Israel that feels both corrective and protective: They are not only the poet’s exegetes and translators, they were also his friends. Amichai’s popularity — facilitated by the clarity and immediacy of his poems, and a tendency, in Alter’s words, to “think of Amichai primarily as a vernacular poet of everyday experience” — has been a deterrent to understanding that “his language is scarcely as vernacular, and not at all as simple, as it is often imagined to be.”

More insidiously, in Kronfeld’s reckoning, these impulses have positioned ­Amichai — who was born in Germany in 1924 and arrived in Palestine with his parents in 1936 — as a de facto Israeli state poet, canonized if not calcified. “The revolutionary Amichai has been occluded by his very canonicity,” she writes. “Amichai’s oeuvre — like Brecht’s and Auden’s — offers an unrelenting critique of the dominant ideology of its time.” (Anyone who cringed, as I did, on hearing William Blake’s “Jerusalem” sung at the wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William will recognize the trouble here.)