Lois Bar Yaacov

Collected Poems Lois Bar Yaacov

These poems are the hidden product of a woman who spent most of her professional life teaching and researching other people's poetry. They tell the story of her inner soul. Lois Bar-Yaacov related to poetry as her vocation and was a passionate teacher of literature, but throughout her life she wrote her own personal poetry which came from her deepest fears and subconscious struggles with herself. She never allowed herself to publish any of her poems in her lifetime. Her acute sense of self-criticism and perfectionism overcame her need to share her poetry with the world. Now, five years after her death, it seems to us, her children, that her legacy should be given a proper stage. Her poems are dreamscapes that flash out at us with fierce subliminal power, while at the same time they tell the story of her life. In them is a strange beauty that connects to her deeply conflicted soul, the soul of a woman who lived through many phases but always remained true to her inner sense of reality. "My muse was not beauty/ but body" she tells us, and it is that honesty and sense of perception that make her voice ring out with a deep sense of truth that cannot be quelled.