Naomi Replansky, In Memory

Naomi Replansky     Photo credit: Robert Giard.

Naomi Replansky passed away January 7, 2023, but her works live on. We will be posting further material as time goes by. In the meantime, please enjoy the samplings of her poetry on this site, and follow the links to hear her reading her own works. 

“Someone like Naomi turns up in one’s life so rarely. She was full of wisdom and kindness that she never showed off. It just glowed from her.” Lynne Sharon Schwartz (January 9, 2023).

"Replansky, born and raised in New York City, settled in L.A. in the '50s and studied at UCLA; she may have written in the provinces, but her work makes clear she was a poet of the world. No other North American poet I've read has been able to incorporate the fire and brilliance of Latin American surrealism in original work of such startling authority. And a lot of us have tried." Philip Levine, review of Poets of the Non-Existent City (L.A. Times Book Review, March 23, 2003).

"These are the poems of a careful poet. Not one who wants to protect herself, but one who is very stern, I think, about honesty. This makes the poems enclosed and hard (not “difficult” but solid, like a nut or a small stone). Not much here about up days and down days, objects beautifully noticed or the ecstasies of the sensory world.... I feel in these poems that Naomi, when she writes, does not look within and say, 'What do I feel?' but rather something like, 'What is the world feeling inside me?' The poems are sometimes political in the way that Blake’s London poems are: a shaft of light falls between dense buildings and the spirit, not “sociology,” is illumined." —Patricia Hampl in The Lamp in the Spine, 1970s.

Naomi Replansky, Poet of Hopeful Struggle, Dies at 104: "Her verse examined social history through individual lives, including her own, in which she later found love. Yet for all the admiration she inspired, she was unheralded." —Margalit Fox, New York Times 1/9/23.

Naomi is survived by her partner, Eva Kollisch, Eva's son and family, and four nieces and nephews and families.

For reprint rights to Naomi Replansky's poems, please contact David Godine Publishing.

 

 Happy 103rd birthday to Naomi Replansky!

From "The Oasis"

 

I thought I held a fruit cupped in my hand.

Its sweetness burst

And loosed its juice. After long traveling,

After so long a thirst,

     I asked myself: Is this a drought-born dream?

     It was no dream.....

 

Naomi's Collected Works will soon be re-issued with a new cover!

Watch here for future announcements.

Naomi Replansky's Poems Reviewed

Naomi Replansky's Collected Works are the subject of a recent Ms. Magazine review.

"Replansky makes problems palpable in her poems, major world problems like the Depression, the Holocaust, the homeless. Then the gravity and force of her language answers those problems in the way that only poetry can. One reads Replansky’s Collected Poems and feels confident that a truly serious soul has given everything possible to the search for answers."

Los Angeles Review of Books on Naomi Replansky's Poetry

Auguries of Experience: The Poetry of Naomi Replansky

by Eric Gudas

NAOMI REPLANSKY’S POEMS have unsettled, obsessed, and captivated me since I first encountered them, as a 20-year-old college student, at a reading in the West Village. That night Replansky, then in her mid-70s, stood before an audience at Judith’s Room, a now defunct bookstore, and recited from memory — in a voice that bore traces of her childhood “in the dream-tossed Bronx” — poems peopled by exiles, refugees, prisoners, outcasts, the unquiet dead, outlaws, and poets at daggers drawn with the Muse. Replansky prefaced her reading by quoting from William Blake’s “Infant Sorrow”: “My mother groan’d! my father wept. / Into the dangerous world I leapt.” 

See the full article at Los Angeles Review of Books

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