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| 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.
