Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

  Rose Slivka, art critic, editor and writer,  
  died in 2004, in Southampton, New York,
  of heart failure. From 1959 to 1979, she
  was the editor-in-chief of the magazine
  Craft Horizons. Whilst on the staff of the
  magazine, her prose considered the works
  produced by Dale Chihuly, Lenore Tawney,
  Peter Voulkos, Isamu Noguchi and many
others. She was primarily interested in artists powered by creative expression and formal merits.

   In 1980 she launched a quarterly publication, Craft International, which folded after several issues. Her discerning essays and intelligent reviews displayed her knowledge and understanding of artists, an affinity and vision which were fostered when she was a part of New York's art world of the 1950s and 1960s. She was married to the sculptor David Slivka and they were close friends of Dylan and Caitlin Thomas.

   A contributor to Art in America, her writings on artists such as Elaine de Kooning are regarded as significant works of criticism. Peter Voulkos: A Dialogue in Clay, an insight into the work of the renowned potter, was published in 1979. Her other books include The Object As Poet and Elaine de Kooning. Spirit of Abstract Expressionism. In the mid-1980s she took the position of art critic for the East Hampton Star when she settled on Long Island, New York.

   Her significance as an interpreter of the creativity of American artists is widely acknowledged. She made a major contribution to craft entering into the mainstream, into the public consciousness as public art. Over four decades her articles and reviews pushed down established barriers of criticism and forged new roads for fresh ideas.

   In her later years, though, as her daughter Charlotte testifies, poetry was Rose's prime passion. She lived for the writing of her poems. The tragic death of her son, Marc, is a shadow falling across her published and unpublished work.

   The poems in this Profile are taken from her collection The Book of Marc.

   I am indebted to Charlotte Slivka, her daughter, for permission to profile her mother and to publish poems from the above work.

'Time has a way of overwhelming the functional values of an object that outlives the men who made and used it, with the power of its own objective presence-that life-invested quality of being that transcends and energizes. When this happens, such objects are forever honored for their own sakes-they are art.' - Rose Slivka, "The Persistent Object"  The Crafts of the Modern World Horizon Press, New York, 1968