Dahlia Ravikovitch

Her poems are taught in schools and universities. Scholars at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia sponsored a "Memorial in Piano, Poetry, and Song" in her honor on March 21, 2006; one of the performers at this event was the late Moroccan poet and performer, Fatema Chebchoub. Several of Ravikovitch's poems were turned into popular songs. Her poetry has been translated into 23 languages.

During the last years of her life, she suffered from severe bouts of depression. On August 21, 2005, Ravikovitch was found dead in her apartment. Initial reports speculated the cause of death to be suicide, but the autopsy determined the cause to be sudden heart irregularities.

Her earlier poetry shows her command of formal technique without sacrificing the sensitivity of her always distinct voice. Although never totally abandoning traditional poetic devices, she developed a more prosaic style in the latter decades of her work. Her popular poem published in 1987, "The End of a Fall" (also called "The Reason for Falling") is from this period. Like many of Ravikovitch's poems, it may strike the reader as, at once, poignant, metaphysical, disturbing, and even political: "If a man falls from a plane in the middle of the night / only God can lift him up...". In her book Haifa: City of Steps literary critic Nili Gold has argued that Haifa and its landscape are crucial to understanding Ravikovitch's early poetry, most notably "Painting" and "Day Unto Day Uttereth Speech". Gold has also argued against the popular interpretation of Ravikovitch's poem "Hovering at a Low Altitude" as a political poem, instead contending that it should be understood as a personal, lyrical one.

Ravikovitch's first poems appeared in the Hebrew language poetry journal Orlogin (Hourglass), edited by Avraham Shlonsky, and it was Shlonsky who encouraged her to pursue writing as a career. Her first book of poetry, The Love of an Orange, published in 1959, established her as one of Israel's leading young native-born poets.

Dahlia Ravikovitch (Hebrew: דליה רביקוביץ'; November 17, 1936 – August 21, 2005) was an Israeli poet, translator, and peace activist.

Ravikovitch was born in Ramat Gan on November 27, 1936. She learned to read and write at the age of three. Her father, Levi, was a Jewish engineer originally from Russia who arrived in Mandatory Palestine from China. Her mother, Michal, was a teacher who came from a religious household. When Dahlia was six, her father was run over and killed by a drunken driver. She moved to Kibbutz Geva with her mother but did not fit into the collectivist mentality and at 13 moved to a foster home in Haifa, the first of several foster homes. It was in those formative years in Haifa that she wrote her very first poem, "Painting", which contrasted the blue of the seaside landscape to the yellow and grey of her inner world.