Dahlia Ravikovitch is Israel's leading woman poet. Born in Ramat Gan in 1936, she has published five volumes of poetry, a book of short stories, and two books of children's verse.


 

The libation that Dahlia Ravikovitch pours is of a sparkling purity and lyric freshness. Her song is both ancient and new, and it is unutterably poignant. Chana Bloch has made a loving translation from the original Hebrew. No poety in recent years has moved me more - Stanley Kunitz

[Ravikovitch's] poetry deals overwhelmingly with extreme states of personal life: desolation, loss, estrangement, breakdown...Landscape, history, the Bible, and best of all, a caustic mother wit: all figure behind the shaken self...She is a poet of wit, severe and costly, and this saves her, at least in the poems...Her language bristles with sharpness...To read these poems is to see the whole world pressed into one imperilled being, and then, through the calming maneuvers of imagination, to watch that being glide past it's own squalor and smallness - Irving Howe, The New Republic

Chana and Ariel Bloch's consistently deft translations...breathe in English the very life of the Hebrew originals - Robert Alter

Contents:

Foreword by Robert Alter
Translator's Note 

The Love of an orange (1959)
On the Road at Night
The Tearing
The Commandment
A Wicked Hand
Clockwork Doll
Painting
A Small Woman
Delight
The Land of the Setting Sun
Night Sorrow
Someone to Save Him
Around Jerusalem
Behind the Rain

A Hard Winter (1964)
Requiem after Seventeen Years
Dust
Magic
Time Caught in a Net
Distant Land
Heartbreak in the Park
Trying
Trying Again
Heron
Hills of Salt
The Raging Waters
Mahlon and Chilion
A Hard Winter
Abuse
They Told Me to Bring
A great tremor
The Blue West

The Third Book (1969)
Surely you Remember
Two Songs of the Garden
Australia
Now the Moon
Vanilla
The Marionette
Pure Memory
Imagination is a Boundless Thing
The Horns of Hittin
Pride
A Dress of Fire
A Personal Opinion
In Chad and Cameroon                                                                                                                                     60
How Hong Kong was Destroyed
In the Right Wind
The End of the Fall
Even a Thousand Years

Deep Calleth Unto Deep (1976)
Day Unto Day Uttereth Speech
Midnight Song
Poem of Explanations
Sand
Deep Calleth Unto Deep
In Jerusalem
Like Rachel
King over Israel
Impoverishment
From Day to Night
the Sound of Birds at Noon

Real Love (1986)
Iddo Wakes Up
The Glass pavilion
Little Child's Head on the Pillow
The Beginning of Silence
Cinderella in the Kitchen
The Finish Line
A Declaration for the future
Rough Draft
Requiem
Gladi in Richmond
Blood Heifer
You Can't Kill a Baby Twice
Hovering at Low Altitude
New Zealand
It Will Certainly Come
Birdy
Light and Darkness
The Window

Notes to the Poems
Biograhical Notes