Sinopsis

The 1983 Lamont poetry selection of the Academy of American Poets.
The Dead and the Living presents a beautifully realized cycle of poems beginning with those that honor the dead, then poems that burrow into childhood, limning the uncomfortable; and culminating in poems for the living, moving outward toward love, marriage, children, toward “the tasting, and the giving of life.” 
Larry Lewis say, “The Dead and the Living is an unignorable book, something truly rare.  The feeling behind it is painful, but exquisitely so.  Pain made into art or what, in another time, people called ‘beauty.’”  It is an achievement of a poet writing in the full measure of her powers.