Contributing Editor ~ Helen Bar-Lev, IL

 

 

Interview with Tom Berman Question: What’s your background? I have been a member of Kibbutz Amiad in the Upper Galilee, Israel for over 50 years. I am a scientist (aquatic microbiology) and most of my research has been focused on the Sea of Galilee (known here as Lake Kinneret). I grew up and attended school in Glasgow, Scotland having arrived there aged 5 from Czechoslovakia with the Kindertransport in 1939. Further education was in the U.S. at Rutgers University and at M.I.T. I am married with one wife, three daughters, seven granddaughters, a grandson and a mongrel dog. Question: When did you begin to write poetry and what prompted you to write? Writing poetry has not come simply for me even though I started out with the advantage of a sound Scottish education. That meant being extensively exposed to the English classics including Shakespeare and the contents of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Thus, I was taught to write and to appreciate the English language at a young and vulnerable age. Like many youngsters, I scribbled purportedly deep and profound lines as an adolescent, like most, I then abandoned efforts to express myself in verse for many a long year. Then along came the computer; suddenly the technical part of writing, and rewriting and shifting and cutting and pasting became so easy. One day, I looked at some of the scraps of scribble that I had long since stuffed into an old envelope and began to type them out on the computer. Behold a poet is come amongst us! Shortly thereafter I heard of “Voices”, a group of poets writing in English in Israel. “Voices” aficionados meet monthly in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa. I began to attend the meetings of the latter group and was “hooked”. That was about 12 years ago and I suppose that I’ve been writing sporadically ever since. Question: What inspires your poetry? Hard to answer. Maybe the kind of topics covered in my latest book Rambles, Outings with a Wayward Muse: Love Poems, Vistas of Home, Animals, Wars Creation and other Oddities, Nature and the Obstinacy of Hope, and, of course, incidents from my personal history. Question: Which forms do you prefer? Why? Free form, I suppose because I’m too lazy to really invest time into crafting my poems. Question: What, in your opinion, makes a poem good or memorable? Maybe it’s trite, but I would say, “Resonance is all”. I’m impressed if the poem has inner rhythm, cohesion, cadence, lines or phrases or an ending that leaps out at me so that I say, after reading it, “Wow” (or something similar). I am even more impressed if the poem does all that, is written in verse and conforms to a recognized poetic form. Question: Who is your favorite poet? I must confess to having absorbed deeply from many of “the usual suspects”. So I list Shakespeare, Milton, Robert Burns, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Auden, Graves, Frost, Eliot, Lewis Carol, Emily Dickinson, e e cummings, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and modern Scottish poets Hugh MacDiarmid, Tom Leonard. Also many of the poets who appear in a wonderful, now forgotten trilogy edited by Geoffrey Summerfield called Voices published by Penguin in 1968; likewise a bunch of poets in the Faber Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Poetry. I’m greatly impressed by much of the poetry appearing in Staying Alive and Being Alive, two recent, eclectic anthologies edited by Neil Astley. I also enjoy reading some (but by no means all) of the poetry that appears on the Net or that is written by my friends in Voices. Obviously that’s too many names to list. Question: Where have you been published? Most of my publications have been scientific but now I have two collections of my poetry to my name; Shards, a Handful of Verse and Rambles, Outings with a Wayward Muse (both available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc). Now and again I have had poems appear in press (Ariel, Voices Anthologies, Full Circle, Voices from Israel, Travelling, Across the Long Bridge, Sailing in the Mists of Time, The World Poets Quarterly, Aquirelle, Magnapoets) or on the Web (Poetry Webring Review, Poetry Life & Times, Ariga, Poeticdiversity, PoetrySuperHighway, SubtleTea, The Coffee Press Journal, Lily, Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry, Illiterate Hooligan, The Poetry Victims, Cyclamens & Swords and elsewhere). From 2003 to 2006 I served as Editor in Chief of the annual Voices Israel Anthology.     Rain Haiku   i In a distant land I think of the first rain Falling on dusty fields ii Drops begin to fall Wetting parched leaves Rain has returned iii House gutters run fast A merriment of rain Water flows rapidly iv On an arid land Rain caresses dry soil The cycle is renewed v Through a rain curtain I see my native hills Grow green once more     Waiting   For more than 3 billion years Earth was inhabited solely by single celled organisms Who can imagine the long solitude of bacteria on our watery globe 3 billion years of loneliness waiting for evolution to stop by and stir things up It’s a long wait, even for bacteria who might not know any better     Anger not the Gods   This is a land of ancient gods They have not left this landscape they reside in the anguish of stones in the gray bark of carob trees in the dimness of karst caves, and rubble remains of forgotten dwellings They sigh in dry thorn stalks on summer hillsides, their breath hovers in whorls of dust This is an old, hard land with a surfeit of memory It does not take much to stir passions or memories when the wind rustles leaves in the olive groves Tread lightly on the land of ancient gods     To an unnamed colleague   Herewith a phrase or two exploding you o bladder of pomposity, filled with fatuity swollen, smirking sack balloon of bloated bombast, caricature of self-esteem May my words be as sharp shears clipping off the witless wool you’ve spun over the eyes of your bemused beholders.     Storks   at dusk a stork speckled sky storks are flying to the northlands as their generations have taught them they are flying to the northlands where hope and old nests await light fades as silk to evening smooth sleek gliders homing to the darkling woods where secrets sleep with the storks.

 

The Leather Suitcase

 

They don’t make suitcases like that any more. Time was, when voyage meant train, steamship distances unbridgeable waiting for a thinning mail weeks, then months, then nothing Time was, when this case was made solid, leather, heavy stitching with protective edges at the corners. Children’s train, across the Reich stops and starts again... Holland a lighted gangplank, night ferry to gray-misted sea-gulled Harwich again the rails reaching flat across East Anglia, to London in my bedroom the suitcase, a silent witness with two labels “Masaryk Station, Praha” “Royal Scot, London-Glasgow” Leather suitcase from a far-off country, Czechoslovakia, containing all the love parents could pack for a five year old off on a journey for life.

*From the end of 1938 until the outbreak of War in Sept. 1939, about 10,000, mostly Jewish children (unaccompanied by parents or adults) were brought from Nazi-controlled Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to Great Britain under the Kindertransport scheme. But for the Kindertransport, few, if any, of these would have survived the War.