The poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch presents as self-writing nestled in the wide embrace of non-linear écriture féminine. Each poem offers a glimpse of the persona: body and soul, the music of her voice and the perspective of her spirit. Together the poems comprise verbal self-portraits of a lovelorn soul, torn between impulses to fully remember and deliberately forget.
Through years of love, life, disappointment, bouts of depression and renewed promise, Dahlia Ravikovitch continued to compose. Through the crystals of poetry the speaker examines, from varying angles and in multiple refractions of light, those figures of alterity who are her self. For Ravikovitch poetry was the only neutral space in which her self could comfortably exist and, even so, not always.
The poet-persona experiences love in unsuitable proportions. She receives too little; she goes ‘overboard’ and ‘out of bounds’ in giving too much. She experiences love, even when accessible, as an affliction. She suffers love. She laments love.
The persona performs her malaise through contrasting physical sensations, idiosyncrasies and profound cravings. Her personal thermostat is erratic. She exhibits pronounced wardrobe-predilections. Her throat reacts to a flow of eros and creative vitality or lack thereof. She yearns for pure memory and thirsts for pure essence.
The speaker’s gallery displays an elaborate montage of a golden apple endowed with gifts of wisdom, eros, poetry and passion, alongside portraits of a royal chanteuse and a skilled scribe. Crucial brushstrokes illuminate lovers and sinners, souls in flames, shipwrecks, lyric-expressive throats in various states of constriction and release, as well as voices of collective responsibility.
Ravikovitch encrypts her poetry with rich resources of biblical, rabbinic, medieval and early modern Hebrew literature. She forwards the linguistic and literary resonance of these layers. She innovates upon their motifs through feats in the dimensions of feminine writing, intertextual engagements and postmodern poetics.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/32957 |
| Date | 05 September 2012 |
| Creators | Wiseman, Laura |
| Contributors | Fox, Harry |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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