In Memory of Edith Shiffert

She was a "Poet Inspired by Nature and Her Life in Japan," Times journalist Margalit Fox writes of American poet Edith Shiffert, who died on March 1 in Japan at the age of 101 after spending roughly fifty years of her life there. NYT broke the news to American readers over the weekend. "Her death, announced on the website Writers in Kyoto, was not publicized outside Japan," Fox writes. Let's start there:

Ms. Shiffert, who had dementia, had been in a nursing home for about a decade, her American publisher and literary executor, Dennis Maloney, said on Friday.

The author of nearly two dozen volumes of poetry, Ms. Shiffert was published in The New Yorker and — at midcentury, when newspapers routinely printed poems — in The New York Times and elsewhere. She was also known as a writer on, and translator of, Japanese poetry.

Ms. Shiffert was a quiet sensualist, her verse characterized by spare simplicity and a deep, abiding affinity with the natural world. Her poems were inclined to be short (she was keenly influenced by haiku), and were often organized around unobtrusive — and therefore highly effective — rhyme or half-rhyme, the prosodic device in which two words are united by a shared final sound.

In “The Summer Tree,” published in The Christian Science Monitor in 1968, for instance, the first four stanzas employ half- and whole rhymes in alternation.The rhymed lines also shift position from one stanza to the next, creating a feeling of rippling movement that suggests leaves ruffled by the wind:

Since winter ended for this tree, new leaves
filled all the branches, grew, could not restrain
themselves from coming. They will wilt and drop,
be nothing, but for summer they show green.

Light shines all around them. They do not
feel its warmth or shape. They wear the glow
belonging to the season while they grow.
They wear the light, and that is what they are.

The rustle and the texture of the leaves,
the way they look, their smell and taste, do not
concern them on their stems and twigs. Each
      moves
as air moves, and when winter comes it falls.

Grow is not a word to lightly say.
The tree is there. It uses what it is.
Underground the roots expand. In air
branches rise and spread. The tree is there.

Read on at the New York Times.