For Hanoch Levin, a great Israeli playwright, author, and poet born in 1943, death was the one and only true muse, the great and bottomless well of inspiration. And so, it is only appropriate to remember this iconic author shortly after his yahrzeit last week, 19 years after his death of bone cancer, at age 56. Death permeates, in some way or another, nearly every poem of the recently published Lives of the Dead: Collected Poems of Hanoch Levin, translated by British poet and playwright Atar Hadari. The volume, which received a prestigious PEN Translates award in England, is the first, and long overdue, book of Levin's poetry to be released in English, and it is a cause for celebration.

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