Poems

Of the untold number of deep relationships forged between John Wooden and his players, his friendship with former center Swen Nater stood out. Theirs was a friendship not just of respect and reverence, but also of rhyme. During the last dozen years, Nater sent his coach roughly 120 poems he composed, most of which were inspired by something Wooden had taught him at UCLA. "You try to give back to a teacher if you can," said Nater, 60, now a Costco executive. "He gave you so much, and it's difficult for a student to give back to a teacher.

Much of Dana Gioia's poetry might be set in the contemporary world, but a host of ancient, mythic references echo in the speakers' voices and the scenes they present to readers. In "Pity The Beautiful: Poems" (Graywolf: 75 pp., $15 paper), a new collection by the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (and now a professor of poetry at the University of Southern California), Gioia sounds an elegiac note as he considers lost loved ones, growing older and the daily frustrations that cause us to yearn for something more transcendent.

Leave it to Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet who died this month at 88, to write a poem celebrating tragedy's nonexistent sixth act. This is when, as she described it in "Theatre Impressions," the offstage dead return for their bows, actors straighten their wigs and fancy gowns and, as the curtain falls, it's possible to see a hand as it "quickly reaches for a flower" or "picks up a fallen sword. " Only after the stage has gone dark does the poet feel the hand of tragedy grabbing her by the throat.

Israel's high ground Re "Israel's poetry critics," Editorial, April 10 German poet Gunter Grass and I both inhabited the same country during World War II. The difference between us: I wore striped pajamas in concentration camps, and he wore the gray uniform of the Waffen SS. I ask Grass: Why does he consider Israel a threat to world peace? Israel was not accepted by its neighbors when it was established in 1948 and was threatened with annihilation. Pronouncements by Iranian leaders denying the Holocaust and their threats to destroy the Jewish state are of great concern.

In "My Nephew Tony" (May 17, in some editions), Jessica Reynolds Shaver quotes some letters she said Anthony Reynolds had sent her from prison, adding, "I didn't know he wrote poetry." In reality, Tony does not write poetry. He copies poetry, and it appears that he has conned his aunt into believing that she sees "a Tony in them that I have never seen before, the Tony I knew must be there." The poems in the article were written by James Kavanaugh, published in a book titled "There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves" (Dutton, 1970)

I was one of many who wrote to you to protest the change in the Book Review's policy on poetry reviews. But I owe you this letter of appreciation. I think that the new format and policy serve poetry well, albeit differently. I have enjoyed the poems and the vignettes about the poets immensely, and look forward to them each week. I want dialogue about poetry, but I think that in this poetry-starved media universe we inhabit the presentation of poetry itself is more important.

For the reader boiling in triple-digit SoCal heat at the end of the summer, Donald Hall's "The Back Chamber: Poems" arrives like a sudden cloudburst and shower of cooling rain. Again Hall takes readers into his New Hampshire, a realm of "fiddleheaded ferns, lilacs purpling / trilliums, apparition of daffodils" and soft breezes where "my grandfather and I," he recalls in "Maples," "with Riley the horse, / took four days to clear the acres of hay / from the fields on both sides of the house.

As one dedicated to poetry composition, and recently inducted into the International Society of Poets at their convention and symposium, I found a faulty assumption in the Book Review section most repugnant and misleading ("Anne Sexton: A Biography," Aug. 25). Reviewer Nancy Mairs noted "the roster of modern poets dead by their own hands--among them Delmore Schwartz, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman--who communicated to the following generation the belief that, in writing poetry, they courted death."

"Am I glad to be a woman?" begins a poem written by Gailellen Conyers. "Am I glad to be a black woman in the 20th Century?" Several times a month, Conyers reads this and other poetry at small Orange County coffee shops and community theaters. The poems express the joy and anger that span her 40 years. "Poetry is my heart, my soul," said Conyers, sitting in her elegant, contemporary house in Orange, a place far removed from the foster homes and abuse of her childhood.

The following poems by Irish poet Seamus Heaney were cited by the Swedish Academy in awarding him the 1995 Nobel literature prize: "The Wishing Tree," from his 1987 collection, "The Haw Lantern" I thought of her as the wishing tree that died And saw it lifted, root and branch, to heaven, Trailing a shower of all that had been driven Need by need by need into its hale Sap-wood and bark: coin and pin and nail Came streaming from it like a comet-tail New-minted and dissolved.

Once a year, the sheepmen — white-haired, crinkly-eyed, some using walkers — pack into a cafe to share stories of herding bull-headed sheep amid furious snowstorms here in Nevada's Snake Valley, a forlorn patch of desert on the border with Utah. In the mythology of the American West, the sheepherder may be outshone by gunslingers and prospectors. But not when the sheepmen get together. Not tonight. Gusts rattled the walls of the Border Inn, much as they once pounded their desolate sheep camps, trailers so thinly insulated that the men sometimes awoke to a cupboard full of frozen eggs.

Leave it to Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet who died this month at 88, to write a poem celebrating tragedy's nonexistent sixth act. This is when, as she described it in "Theatre Impressions," the offstage dead return for their bows, actors straighten their wigs and fancy gowns and, as the curtain falls, it's possible to see a hand as it "quickly reaches for a flower" or "picks up a fallen sword. " Only after the stage has gone dark does the poet feel the hand of tragedy grabbing her by the throat.

Here's a cosmic truism: The end of the Earth is just another item on the universe's to-do list. The poet Robinson Jeffers understood this reality. That such a perspective need not be bleak is something he spent decades telling readers. Until his death on Jan. 20, 1962 -- 50 years ago -- Jeffers celebrated the "transhuman magnificence" of nature, the beautiful things both vast and near that can provide even a 21st century reader with solace, even if we are often a muddled, ugly species and even if all things, as they do, fade away.

There is far more softness than steel in "The Iron Lady," starring Meryl Streep as the iconic British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The film catches her long after she's left the public eye, and rather than an examination, or an assessment, of her politics, it instead offers up an affecting if not always satisfying portrait of the strong-willed leader humbled by age. Director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan have discarded most...

This just in: NBC has traded Bob Costas to CBS for Ashton Kutcher and the entire library of "Green Acres" reruns. The deal has not been finalized, but Chris Paul has threatened to try to block the deal, citing many of the "Green Acres" episodes as kind of schlocky and in need of another rewrite. This just in: Washington has traded the Lincoln Memorial to St. Louis for the Arch, three Italian joints and the Rams. Chris Paul has sued to try to block the deal, citing the Rams as a fictional entity with no real market value.

Robin Robertson is caught between worlds - between the contemporary London in which he lives and an epic past evoked by longboats and bonfires and where myths, not science, explain the workings of the world. His 2006 collection "Swithering" actively moved between both just as that interesting word - a Scottish one referring not only to agitation but also to vacillation and movement - clearly announced on the book's cover. And in his new collection, "The Wrecking Light" (Mariner Books: 97 pp., $13.95 paper)

There are cartons of this stuff in attics all over America ? the poems, pensées and grocery lists of yearning, dissatisfied people who at some time wished for an emotional coherence that was beyond their reach. These scribbles are of no great posthumous consequence; at most they may cause the relative who happens to open the box to reflect, a little sadly, on the secret life of the author. Unless, of course, that author happens to have been famous and somewhat mysterious, which is the case with Marilyn Monroe.

My Flower World Sebastian, 12 Emperor Elementary Temple City The ocean of flowers swaying in front, my watering can in my hand, a pair of clippers in the other, ready to perform my plan. The can is spewing waterfalls, the clipper is a sword. I wipe my head and admire my giant flower world. Wishing Larka, 12 Northridge Middle School Northridge They say when you wish upon a star, it will come true. But when I wished on that star, I'm still waiting to this day. They say pennies found are lucky.

Shot in the dusty desert of California, where the Salton Sea was once intended as a getaway oasis and is now a near-abandoned ghost town, the hybrid film "Bombay Beach" is more lyrical tone poem than straightforward documentary. Directed and shot by the Israeli-born photographer and video artist Alma Har'el, the film interweaves footage of residents in their real, regular lives and also captured in staged reveries of dance while following three subjects: a young boy, an old man and a transplant from South Central Los Angeles looking for a fresh start.

For the reader boiling in triple-digit SoCal heat at the end of the summer, Donald Hall's "The Back Chamber: Poems" arrives like a sudden cloudburst and shower of cooling rain. Again Hall takes readers into his New Hampshire, a realm of "fiddleheaded ferns, lilacs purpling / trilliums, apparition of daffodils" and soft breezes where "my grandfather and I," he recalls in "Maples," "with Riley the horse, / took four days to clear the acres of hay / from the fields on both sides of the house.