SOURCE: A review of Call Yourself Alive? : Love Poems of Nina Cassian, in World Literature Today, Winter, 1990, pp. 92-3.

In the following review, Dorian praises the way in which Cassian's poetry captures the "wonderfully shocking metamorphoses and mutations of words and feelings, of people and objects."

Nina Cassian is a prolific poet with a large number of verse collections (On the Scale 1/1, Songs for the Republic, The Ages of the Year, The Daily Holidays, Outdoor Show, Parallel Destinies, The Discipline of the Harp, Chronophagia, Ambitus, Lotto-Poems, Counting Backward, et cetera) and with a definite place in the generation of Romanian poets who began publishing at the end of the last war. Her poetry takes shape at the intersection of lucidity ("the platinum scalpel with which / I attempt the surgery of truth") with the games of imagination, the enticing, wonderfully shocking metamorphoses and mutations of words and feelings, of...