Four Exercises in Visual Poetics: On the Poetry Album of Dalia Rabikovitch / ארבעה תרגילים בפואטיקה ויזואלית: על 'מרוב אהבה', אלבום שיריה של דליה רביקוביץ'

'Ut pictura poesis', declares Horace in the renowned essay Ars-Poetica. This statement has contoured the labyrinthine history of the relationship between painting and poetry, with the ekphrastic moment as one of its peaks. My article examines a specific case of ekphrasis: the poetry album devoted to the oeuvre of the modern Hebrew poet Dalia Rabikovitch. This album brings together Rabikovitch's poetry with Israeli plastic works of the same period. I will show that the latter are not simply placed alongside the poetic texts as illustrations, but rather create together a liminal zone, a new hybrid of words and images. This liminality, I argue, can potentially establish a relationship which goes beyond straightforward correspondence, a relationship that is based on a mixture of harmony and interruption, mutual inspiration and territorial struggle. When realized in the album, this mixture sheds new light on both the text and the visual image; in a dialectic move, each work is rebuilt and redefined in the face of its Other. Yet in some cases the visual work demands a louder voice than that of the written text; and so the arbitrary force that has been latent in the dialectic encounter becomes violent, devoid of any critical dimension.