Poetpge25

Fall 2013

Featured Interview

James E. Cherry is an MFA Candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso. His prose and poetry has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award, a Lillian Smith Book Award and was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award for Short Fiction. He is the author of four previous books: Bending the Blues, a poetry chapbook (2003), Honoring the Ancestors, a collection of poetry (2008), Shadow of Light, a novel (2008) and Still A Man and Other Stories, a collection of short fiction published in 2011. In the Spring of 2013, his second collection of poetry, Loose Change, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press. Cherry resides in Tennessee with his wife and is preparing a novel for publication. In this issue, an interview with James Cherry and a selection of his poetry. Visit him at: www.jamescherry.com.

Kimberly Mathes is the 2012 Bright Harvest Prize Winner for poetry selected by Aquarius Press. She has two poems in the 200 New Mexico Poems Project with the printed version of the anthology forthcoming from University of New Mexico Press. She has a M.A. in English from Case Western Reserve University and is now beginning the final year of her MFA program in Creative Writing with the University of Texas El Paso. After living for over a decade in the Four Corners area of New Mexico, Kimberly now resides in Phoenix. She is Residential Faculty in Composition and Creative Writing at Glendale Community College and spends time chasing poems and Arizona sunsets on her Harley. In this issue new poems and her interview with James Cherry.

Centenary Feature: Robert Friend

November 25, 1913-January 12, 1998

Robert Friend died on January 1998 in Jerusalem, Israel, of cancer. He was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian immigrant parents. After studying at Brooklyn College, Harvard and Cambridge, he taught English literature and writing in the U.S., Puerto Rico, Panama, France, England, and Germany.Robert Friend settled in Israel in 1950, where he lived the rest of his life. He taught English and American Literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for over thirty years, at the same time becoming well-known as a poet (writing in English) and as a translator of Hebrew poetry. His poems and translations have appeared in many periodicals, including The New York Times, Encounter, The London Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Partisan Review, Poetry, Ariel, Commentary, The Jerusalem Post, and The Jerusalem Review.

His first published volume of verse, Shadow on the Sun, appeared in 1941; other books of poems and translations followed, including Salt Gifts (1964), The Practice of Absence (1971), Selected Poems (1976), Selected Poems of Leah Goldberg (1976), Natan Alterman: Selected Poems (1978), Somewhere Lower Down (1980), Sunset Possibilities and Other Poems by Gabriel Preil (1985), Dancing With a Tiger (1990), Abbreviations (1994), Flowers of Perhaps: Selected Poems of Ra’’hel (1994). A posthumous volume of translations, Found in Translation: A Hundred Years of Modern Hebrew Poetry, edited by Friend’s literary executor, Gabriel Levin, was published in 1999. Menard Press plans to publish Friend’ Collected Poems in 2003.

Awards include the Jeannette Sewell Davis Prize (Poetry, Chicago). Found in Translation: A Hundred Years of Modern Hebrew Poetry is a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. In this issue:

Noted writers pay tribute to Robert Friend’s life and work:

Anthony Rudolf

Edward Field

Gabriel Levin

Selection of poetry by Robert Friend

Robert Friend’s translations of:

Natan Alterman

Yehuda Amichai

Yocheved Bat-Miriam

Haim Nachman Bialik

Federico García Lorca

Leah Goldberg

Uri Zvi Greenberg

Dan Pagis

Gabriel Preil

Rachel

Rainer Maria Rilke

Arthur Rimbaud

Yisroel Shtern

Claude Vigée

David Vogel

Critical Praise for Robert Friend’s poems and translations

Photo Album of Robert Friend

Feature of Friend’s work in a previous issue