Poems

Transfer By Naomi Shihab Nye BOA Editions. 119 pp. $16   Naomi Shihab Nye is one of the most spirited voices in American poetry. The author, editor, and translator of more than 30 volumes, she is best known for her poetry collections Fuel (1998) and You and Yours (2005), and her award-winning anthology of international poems for young people This Same Sky (1992), which represents 129 poets from 68 countries. In her affirming introduction for that book, she writes, "Whenever someone suggests ‘how much is lost in translation!

Helen Morgan Brooks, a gentle-mannered, soft-spoken writer and teacher who was recognized for the rich poetry she penned during more than 70 years of writing, has died at the age of 85. Mrs. Brooks died Oct. 6 at Kendall at Longwood, a Quaker retirement community in Kennett Square, Chester County. Several memorial services are scheduled. After working for many years as a home economist, Mrs. Brooks spent the second half of her career with the Philadelphia school system, where she taught restaurant practice classes at what was then the O.V. Catto School for Boys.

By Garrison Keillor Viking. 512 pp. $20.95 Reviewed by John Timpane I read hundreds of poems like these when I was coming up. I'm grateful to them. They helped get me started loving poetry. The volume at hand joins Garrison Keillor's otheranthologies, Good Poems of 2003 and Good Poems for Hard Times of 2005. Here, Keillor fills his pages with poems in which people's lives take place against the landscapes of this country. Place, scene, where it happened , are as vibrant as any human presence.

In Distant Survivors the actors don't speak to one another. Instead, they recite poems, primarily about the Holocaust, and two of them speak only in Polish. It's an odd piece of theater that, first off, requires an explanation of how it came to land on a Philadelphia stage. The show at the Walnut Street Theatre's Studio 5 is the result of trips that June Prager, the artistic director of the low-profile, Philadelphia-based Theatre International Exchange, took to Torun, Poland, under the Philadelphia Sister City program.

Sister Clare Immaculate McDonnell and Sister Julia Keegan, professors at Neumann College in Aston, have had their poetry selected for publication. "To Yeats," a poem by Sister Clare, associate professor of English and Franciscan scholar in residence, has been published in the journal The Cord. Sister Julia's poem, "St. Francis of Assisi," has been accepted for publication by the National Library of Poetry and will be included on the recording The Sound of Poetry, a collection of favorite poems from the library.

The Camden area's literary community will celebrate next week the release of a book of previously unpublished poems by Nick Virgilio, a pioneer of contemporary haiku and a lifelong city resident. Compiled and published by former New York Times war correspondent Rick Black, the book features new works selected from collections at the Paul Robeson Library at Rutgers-Camden, where nearly 20,000 haiku and correspondence of the late poet reside. "Nick's poems just hit home for me in meaningful ways," Black, who reported on the first Gulf War, said in a statement.

As Frankie Dudley flips through a thick stack of looseleaf pages, peering through reading glasses at the tip of her nose and with a pencil perched to make corrections, she looks like a schoolteacher. But the 37-year veteran of the Philadelphia public school system has retired from the classroom and is launching a new career. At 61, brimming with a lifetime of lessons and wisdom to impart, Dudley has begun to transcribe and publish her words for a wider audience. Her home for 24 years - and new office - in the township's Pennypacker section has neat stacks of folders with pages of more than 100 handwritten poems, a dozen short stories, two plays and a memoir in the works.

Marjana Lipovsek, the mezzo-soprano who gave a memorable reading of Hans Werner Henze's arrangement of Wagner songs last week at the Academy of Music, reinforced the impression of her sterling vocalism yesterday. She sang Frank Martin's cycle Der Cornet with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Wolfgang Sawallisch, in a program that runs tonight and Tuesday. Martin, a Swiss composer who died in 1974, has layered a musical masterwork on a literary one. The piece sets 23 of Rainer Maria Rilke's 27 poems to music; the poems recount the poignant adventures of a flag-bearer in the Austro-Hungarian war against the Turks.

The pastor is a poet of the barrio, where his congregants face the challenges of life in Hispanic Philadelphia. The Rev. Jaime Rodriguez of First Spanish Baptist Church is also a published poet, thanks to Proyecto Escribir, a project seeking to build the sparse list of faith-based Spanish literature for Hispanics in Philadelphia and other Northeast U.S. cities. Rodriguez's "Cruce de Caminos," or "Crossroads," is subtitled "poemas del barrio para el mundo", "poems from the neighborhood for the world.

For quite some time, educators have said that kids going to school these days can't read past 5th-grade level, that they do not understand the simplest of words, nor the English language. What a pity that even those who manage to graduate from high school are not able to put a sentence together, read a book or have any idea of what it means to be literate. Our kids are not being given the proper tools to meet life today. Oh, I know that not all of our kids are that way. Lots of kids are really smart, and know how to use a computer, which I, at my age, have not learned yet. I am not saying that ALL our kids are unlearned; but something is lacking when kids have to pack weapons in their lunch boxes, and be frisked inside the school entrance, before they can sit down to learn something.

Transfer By Naomi Shihab Nye BOA Editions. 119 pp. $16   Naomi Shihab Nye is one of the most spirited voices in American poetry. The author, editor, and translator of more than 30 volumes, she is best known for her poetry collections Fuel (1998) and You and Yours (2005), and her award-winning anthology of international poems for young people This Same Sky (1992), which represents 129 poets from 68 countries. In her affirming introduction for that book, she writes, "Whenever someone suggests ‘how much is lost in translation!

  Death of Levon Helm Alt Country Blues Poem   I'm washed up and the tribe is thinning.   Lunch can be hit or miss — either way if I'm not hungry afterward what's to complain about?   Turns out extinction is not the issue, not if the formats are steeped in formaldehyde and there is a regular circus.   I'm worried when I get the box home I'll have two shoes for one foot and none for the other which will make me walk in circles like the groupies around Robbie Robertson in 1969 must have.

The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin Edited by Archie Burnett Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 768 pp. $40 Reviewed by John Timpane For about the last 60 years, Philip Larkin (1922-1985) has been, for many, the poet's poet, one of the best, a fastidious craftsman who let only choice, finished pieces out into the light. Now we have The Complete Poems, edited with devotion by Archie Burnett of Boston University. It is a sobering triumph. Or maybe I mean a triumph of sobriety.

The Camden area's literary community will celebrate next week the release of a book of previously unpublished poems by Nick Virgilio, a pioneer of contemporary haiku and a lifelong city resident. Compiled and published by former New York Times war correspondent Rick Black, the book features new works selected from collections at the Paul Robeson Library at Rutgers-Camden, where nearly 20,000 haiku and correspondence of the late poet reside. "Nick's poems just hit home for me in meaningful ways," Black, who reported on the first Gulf War, said in a statement.

PITTSBURGH — If you think Shakespeare's works have been performed so often there's not much left to do with them, think again. No one has ever filmed readings of all 154 sonnets by a succession of actors and nonactors in evocative locations around the world, and presented them in the order Shakespeare published them in 1609. Someone is doing it now, however: Jeff Monahan, president of 72nd St. Films in Manhattan and Connellsville, Pa., and Joanna Lowe, founder of Cup-A-Jo Productions in Pittsburgh.

DEAR ABBY: Several years ago you printed a poem about forgiveness in your column. I clipped the column and saved it, but over time I seem to have lost it. Could you please run this piece again? - Daniela in Toronto DEAR DANIELA: I'm glad to oblige. The poem you have requested, "Decide to Forgive," was written by the late Robert Muller, former assistant secretary-general of the United Nations. Now, with so much turmoil going on in the nation and in the world, its sentiments are particularly relevant: DECIDE TO FORGIVE Decide to forgive For resentment is negative Resentment is poisonous Resentment diminishes and devours the self.

David Livewell found poetry in Kensington long before downtown artists discovered that rough and resilient Philly neighborhood. "As a poet, you're always looking for that right word," says Livewell, whose fondly remembered childhood in a Master Street rowhouse inspired many of the poems in Shackamaxon . His manuscript won the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize from Missouri's Truman State University Press, which will publish the book in September....

The Deleted World Poems By Tomas Tranströmer Versions by Robin Robertson Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 64 pp. $13 paperback. Reviewed by John Timpane   Why wouldn't you buy this book? Thirteen bucks. Exactly 15 poems on 37 pages, plus a short introduction. Less than a dollar a poem, people, to be introduced to the latest Nobel Prize in Literature!? Most of the poems are 20, maybe 30 words long. I realize poems scare the lightning out of people, but really, can we be serious?

LOUIS C. McKEE once said that it requires a large dose of arrogance to think that anyone would be interested in "something you have thought and written down. " That's why, he said, writers who think they are poets are advised to hide their poems "in a box under the bed. " Fortunately for those who enjoy the kind of poetry that Louis McKee was known for - "clarity and candor," as one critic observed - he didn't hide his work under the bed. He published his poetry in more than a dozen chapbooks while also serving as an editor and reviewer of the efforts of fellow scribblers.

If Indian animal rights activists have their way, mega-selling singer and sex symbol Lady Gaga will wear a lettuce dress (a dress made out of lettuce) during her sojourn in New Delhi this weekend. Her Gagaiosity is performing at an invitation-only party Sunday to celebrate India's first Formula 1 auto race. PETA India wants her to promote vegetarianism. (It's a counterpoint to the famed meat dress Gaga wore at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards.) "We'll make her a dress entirely of lettuce," says org rep Sachin Bangera . "It will be a full-length gown, and we'll make sure it looks sexy.