The Bell Jar Shatters: The Political Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch

At the end of August 2005, Dahlia Ravikovitch, one of the great Hebrew poets of our time, was found dead in her apartment in Tel Aviv. The outpouring of grief in the Israeli media testifies to the the major role that Ravikovitch played in the world of Hebrew letters. Ravikovitch was well-known for the fearless clarity with which she took on political issues, not only in her poetry but also in the public arena. She frequently participated in protests against the Occupation and the oppression of the Palestinians. Nor did Ravikovitch hesitate to speak out about Israeli society; as Lawrence Joffe noted in an obituary in the Guardian, "She campaigned for Palestinian rights, and against messianic settler nationalists, yet she also criticized her fellow Israeli secularists' 'culture of nothingness.'" Whenever Ravikovitch appeared on TV, speaking truth to power in her precise, unadorned language, undeterred and undeflected by the scripted pronouncements of politicians and generals, there would be a morning-after tempest in all the newspapers. Poets still have a vital presence in Israel, it appears—especially considering their marginality in our own society, where such a response would be unimaginable.

At a writers' conference in Berkeley in the late 1980s, we asked Dahlia Ravikovitch what made her turn so forcefully to the political in her poetry after years of writing primarily personal lyrics. Her answer came quickly: "Till the invasion of Lebanon [in 1982], I managed somehow to go on living inside a bell jar. But then suddenly, all at once, when the invasion started, the bell jar shattered. Now there's no wall between the political and the personal. It all comes rushing in."

At the time of her death, Dahlia Ravikovitch was considered Israel's greatest living poet. She produced a powerful body of work—ten volumes of poetry, three collections of short stories, and several books of childrens' verse—and translated Poe, Yeats, and Eliot, as well as children's classics, into Hebrew. A much-beloved poet, widely honored for her artistry and her courage, Ravikovitch enjoyed canonical stature from the beginning of her career, and was considered a cultural icon in Israel.. 

http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/Chana-TheBellJarShatters

‘If I didn’t know despair myself, I would not be able to feel the anguish of the oppressed’, she told one interviewer. Here’s the title poem of her collected works, ‘Hovering at a Low Altitude’, where ‘gradually it becomes apparent we are witnessing the rape and murder of a young Arab girl through the eyes of the perpetrator’. 

http://elegantthorn.blogspot.in/2009/04/poetry-month-dahlia-ravikovitch.html