SOURCE: "Letters After Love," in Times Literary Supplement, February 24, 1989, p. 200.

In the following excerpt, Chamberlain favorably reviews Call Yourself Alive? and finds the collection a refined and emotive look at human experience.

The refinement and strength of feeling which distinguish contemporary Romanian poetry have an eminent representative in Nina Cassian, who in this collection of poems from four decades translates her daily joys and disappointments into a glacial, hard-edged, barely real landscape. In "Winter Event" (1947) the snow throws into relief the fire and dazzle of a kiss glimpsed and heard like a passing fox. "The cold" of twenty years later describes a shameful contraction of humanity. The failure to forge bonds, our barely concealed lust for each other's blood ("Cold's lifestyle produces a strange impression of order") are mitigated by convention, "the pale, sweet sister of the law, / making it easier for us, if not to live, / at...