Naomi Replansky: Gray Hairs

Gray Hairs

Gray hairs
crowd out the black.
Not one of them
brings me wisdom.

Wrinkles
provide no armor.
I still quiver
to anyone's dart.

Copyright ©Naomi Replansky

Naomi Replansky

Naomi Replansky (1918–2023) was author of Ring Song (1952), a finalist for the National Book Award. Her later collections are Twenty-One Poems, Old and New, The Dangerous World: New and Selected Poems, 1934–1994, and Collected Poems (Black Sparrow Press/David R. Godine, 2012).

Replansky's poems have appeared in numerous anthologies including No More Masks!, Against Infinity: An Anthology of Contemporary Mathematical Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust; Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies; and Poets of the Non-Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era. An extensive article about her poetry appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books,

A number of Naomi Replansky's readings and interviews are archived and available online through University of Pennsylvania PennSound archive.

Replansky lived in New York City with her partner, Eva Kollisch.

About Naomi Replansky's Collected Works:

"Here in a book, the work of a life. All the poet Naomi Replansky is here: the dry, quiet voice, the incantatory and familiar rhythms that are never quite what you think they are, the wit, the touch of comfort, and the tongue-lash, the modesty that entirely frees her from trend, and the audacity – above all the audacity, the risk-taking, the nerve of the woman! These poems bear honest witness to what it was to be alive, really alive, in the twentieth century, and I turn to them again and again for courage to face the dark opening of the twenty-first."

—Ursula Le Guin

Photograph: Robert Giard.

Naomi Replansky

Pages

August 6, 2007

Gray Hairs

Copyright ©2020– Estate of Naomi Replansky, contents may not be reproduced without permission.

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