Poetpge25

Fall 2013

Featured Interview

James E. Cherry is an MFA Candidate inCreative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso. His prose andpoetry has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award, a Lillian Smith Book Awardand was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award for ShortFiction. He is the author of four previous books: Bending theBlues, a poetry chapbook (2003), Honoring the Ancestors, acollection of poetry (2008), Shadow of Light, a novel (2008) and StillA Man and Other Stories, a collection of short fiction published in2011. In the Spring of 2013, his second collection of poetry, LooseChange, was published by Stephen F. Austin State UniversityPress. Cherry resides in Tennessee with his wife and is preparing anovel for publication. In this issue, an interview with James Cherry and a selection of his poetry.Visit him at: www.jamescherry.com.

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

Centenary Feature: Robert Friend

November 25, 1913-January 12, 1998

Robert Friend diedon January 1998 in Jerusalem, Israel, of cancer. He was born in 1913 inBrooklyn, New York, to Russian immigrant parents. After studying atBrooklyn College, Harvard and Cambridge, he taught English literatureand writing in the U.S., Puerto Rico, Panama, France, England, andGermany.Robert Friend settled in Israel in 1950, where helived the rest of his life. He taught English and American Literature atthe Hebrew University in Jerusalem for over thirty years, at the sametime becoming well-known as a poet (writing in English) and as atranslator of Hebrew poetry. His poems and translations have appeared inmany 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 JerusalemReview.

His first published volume of verse, Shadow onthe Sun, appeared in 1941; other books of poems and translationsfollowed, including Salt Gifts (1964), The Practice of Absence (1971), Selected Poems (1976), Selected Poems of LeahGoldberg (1976), Natan Alterman: Selected Poems (1978),Somewhere Lower Down (1980), Sunset Possibilities and OtherPoems by Gabriel Preil (1985), Dancing With a Tiger (1990),Abbreviations (1994), Flowers of Perhaps: Selected Poems ofRa’’hel (1994). A posthumous volume of translations, Found inTranslation: A Hundred Years of Modern Hebrew Poetry, edited byFriend’s literary executor, Gabriel Levin, was published in 1999. MenardPress 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 HebrewPoetry 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

HaimNachman Bialik

Federico García Lorca

Leah Goldberg

Uri ZviGreenberg

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