Influential poet Edith Shiffert dies at 101

KYOTO, Japan (AP) — Edith Shiffert, an American poet whose work was profoundly influenced by the halfcentury she spent in Japan, died on March 1 in Kyoto, where she had long made her home. She was 101. 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.

The daughter of John Benjamin Marcombe and the former Annie Marie Drew, Edith Marion Marcombe was born in Toronto on Jan. 9, 1916. Her family moved to the United States when she was a young child, and she lived variously in Rochester, Detroit and Redondo Beach, Calif.