SOURCE: An Introduction, in Life Sentence: Selected Poems, W.W. Norton and Company, 1990, pp. xv-xxiv.

In this introduction to Life Sentence, Smith praises Cassian's intensity, gives an overview of pervading themes in her work, and offers biographical information on the poet.

Nina Cassian comes to us, even in translation, as a poet of tremendous range and vitality. We are at once aware of her antecedents: a modernist, nurtured on those French poets who, through T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, helped to change the shape of twentieth-century poetry in England and America, she is at the same time very much the product of Romania. Her poetry has something of the clear line and the strikingly simple texture of her countryman, Brancusi, and, like him, her sophistication is grounded in folklore. There is great variety to her work and a comic spirit that recalls the theater of the absurd...