The Window

"This new volume, which includes revised translations from Ravikovitch's earlier collection A Dress Of Fire, as well as many new poems, confirms her reputation as one of the most important poets in Israel today. Ravikovitch displays a rare ability to personify nature and then identify with its loneliness: 'I tell you, even rocks crack,/ and not because of age." In another poem, even ants grouped together to carry "half a dead fly' seem to manage better than the poet. Hers is a world of struggle, survival, endurance, loneliness, and doom, and though her poems might be rooted in biblical imagery, they cry out to women across all cultural barriers. The final poems, written after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, extend that same horrific cry far beyond the personal."—Library Journal

"[Ravikovitch's] poetry deals overwhelmingly with extreme states of personal life: desolation, loss, estrangement, breakdown . . . 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 its own squalor and smallness."—The New Republic