The 1983 Lamont poetry selection of the Academy of American Poets. piThe Dead and the Livingi 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. pLarry Lewis say, iThe Dead and the Living iis 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.