Poetry

Despite the title "Earth and Sky," audiences will not see a nature study during Colonial Players' current production of Douglas Post's 1989 drama. Instead, they can expect to find a fast-paced murder mystery that transforms CP's in-the-round theater space into a poetic film-noir setting. Post has created a poet heroine devoted to the works of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, whose poem, "This Side of Truth," provides the play's title. His poetry consoles the heroine when she is in doubt: "They are only dead who did not love.

Marie Rose Cornely, a homemaker who enjoyed writing poetry, died Sunday of heart disease at Stella Maris Hospice. She was 87. Marie Rose McKenna was born and raised in Philadelphia. She was a 1943 graduate of the Academy of Notre Dame de Namur in Villanova, Pa. She was an office worker before her 1947 marriage to Dr. Donald A. Cornely Sr.. The couple lived in Philadelphia when Dr. Cornely taught at the University of Pennsylvania and later at the University of Pittsburgh.

Nine Maryland high school students gathered Saturday at the Enoch Pratt Free Library to compete for the state championship in the national Poetry Out Loud competition. The students recited memorized selections by Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and other giants. They clenched their fists and clutched their hearts to accentuate dramatic passages. Competitors were judged on presence, articulation, understanding of the poem and the difficulty of their selections. The winner, Nora Sand- ler, a senior at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, received a $200 prize and advanced to the national finals in Washington at the end of April.

Eileen S. Tarcay, who had taught English and journalism at what is now Coppin State University and was a prolific contributor of freelance articles to The Baltimore Sun, died Feb. 18 from complications of a stroke at a Salt Lake City nursing home. The former Homeland resident was 97. The former Eileen Schultz was born in Hiawatha, Utah, and was raised there and in Latuda, Utah, both coal-mining towns. After graduating from St. Mary of the Wasatch High School in Salt Lake City in 1931, she earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1935 at the University of Utah.

Matt Porterfield's restless and moving "Putty Hill" is about a pocket of working-class Baltimoreans reacting to the overdose death of a 24-year-old man. It finds seductive underlying forms in what outsiders might consider shapeless lives. When skateboarders and BMXers streak up and down and over a course of concrete dips and valleys, and a teenager tags a wall with a spray-paint baroque version of "Rest in peace, Cody," they prove that they have poetry in them. The director doesn't impose his poetry on them.

A family vacation, a fleeting sensual moment, reading with a daughter on the couch: This is the stuff of daydreams - and the stuff of Michael S. Glaser's poems. He always has sought to share these poems, and those of others, with as many people as possible. Since he came to St. Mary's College of Maryland as a professor of English in 1970, Glaser has been a champion of poetry in the classroom, at the bi-annual literary festival he founded, and at readings around the state for audiences of all ages.

Editor's note: Jerdine Nolen writes today about the power of poetry. Her column appears biweekly. We don't need the calendar showing that Feb. 14 is near to set our hearts aflutter with thoughts of love and flowery phrases for our dear ones. Any day of the year is the right time to send sweet nothings to those we care about. "Roses are red, Violets are blue! Sugar is sweet, And so are you!" As corny as it sounds, and as overused as it is, I blush warmly when my family members express that sentiment to me. For children, reading poems is fun. Writing poetry can be even more fun!

"Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."Abraham Lincoln's wise words of the Gettysburg Address were not merely a speech, they were poetry. Our nation at its best is defined by such eloquence: "Come, ye thankful people come . . . ," "Mine eyes have seen the glory . . . ," "I've got a mule, her name is Sal . . .""Hand in Hand: An American History Through Poetry," collected by Lee Bennett Hopkins, illustrated by Peter Fiore (Simon & Schuster, $19.95)

Washington--Like many people who have not been back home in some time, Adrienne Rich is approaching her return to Baltimore this weekend with a mixture of anticipation and curiosity. The trips to Lexington Market, eating crab cakes -- these are things she hopes are still as delightful as they were during a comfortable childhood in North Baltimore in the 1930s and '40s.But there are other things she remembers less fondly -- the racism, the homophobia, the closed social system that included well-bred gentiles and few others.

Maya Angelou's presence at Bill Clinton's inauguration today marks the first time a poet has participated in a presidential swearing-in ceremony since Robert Frost appeared at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961.The nation has come a long way in the interim, and Mr. Clinton's choice of Ms. Angelou is a fitting reminder of the vast social and demographic changes that have transformed America over the past three decades.Mr. Frost's was the voice of a Norman Rockwell America of New England small towns and farms, a place where family values and hard work were taken-for-granted emblems of the national purpose and civic virtue.

Ruth Garbis, a homemaker who enjoyed writing poetry, died July 18 of heart failure at Stella Maris Hospice. She was 91. Born Ruth Rochkind in Baltimore, the daughter of a Russian immigrant father and Baltimore-born mother, she spent her early years on West North Avenue. During the Depression, she moved with her family to Richmond, Va., and worked in her parents' grocery store and luncheonette. It was while living in Richmond that Mrs. Garbis developed her lifelong commitment to civil rights, when she gave up her seat on a streetcar to an elderly African-American woman, engendering the wrath of the motorman.

Hugh K. Holmes, a retired lawyer, banker and volunteer who wrote limericks and poetry in his spare time, died May 16 of renal failure at Stella Maris Hospice in Timonium. The longtime Pasadena resident was 92. Mr. Holmes, whose parents owned a grocery store, was born in Baltimore and raised in Glen Burnie, where he graduated in 1936 from Glen Burnie High School. He earned his law degree from the University of Baltimore in 1944 and served in Army intelligence from 1946 to 1947.

Caryn Coyle said she marks CityLit Festival on her calendar every year and plans to attend as many of the readings as she can cram into the day. Before noon Saturday, the Rodgers Forge resident had already amassed a stack of newly purchased books and had just come from a discussion of a novel about life in Baltimore's Highlandtown neighborhood. She was headed to a poetry reading and planning to finish the day listening to several novelists discuss their works. "I love all the stories," she said.

Matt Porterfield's restless and moving "Putty Hill" is about a pocket of working-class Baltimoreans reacting to the overdose death of a 24-year-old man. It finds seductive underlying forms in what outsiders might consider shapeless lives. When skateboarders and BMXers streak up and down and over a course of concrete dips and valleys, and a teenager tags a wall with a spray-paint baroque version of "Rest in peace, Cody," they prove that they have poetry in them. The director doesn't impose his poetry on them.

"A Matter of Life and Death" (1946) will make excellent post-Valentine's Day viewing at the Enoch Pratt Free Library 's central location Saturday. It's about love as the force that takes the full measure of a man or a woman, even during wartime. The movie starts when an RAF poet-pilot (David Niven), stuck in a plane blasted to ribbons, bails out without a parachute — and lives. The "conductor" meant to transport him to heaven loses him in dense English fog. A sensitive American (Kim Hunter)

"Tiger, tiger burning bright "In the forest of the night, "What immortal hand or eye "Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

When I came to live in Baltimore in 1971 I did not know any of the writers in the city. But one writer soon became known to me, as I introduced myself to strangers in the old Peabody Book Store and O'Henry's Bar, telling people I was a poet. As soon as I called myself a poet I would get a reflex response that was inevitable no matter whom I talked to.''Do you know Joe Cardarelli?''I did not know Joe Cardarelli, but after hearing his name two or tTC three times it began to ring a bell. I had seen his poems in a popular anthology called ''Quickly Aging Here,'' a book by writers who were in their 20s in the late 60s. Now the title resonates with irony.

Gertrude Stein, seminal Baltimore poet and post-modern counterweight to this town's Poeish ways, once measured Charm City so: " ... Nothing really can stop any one living and feeling as they do in Baltimore." In doing so, Stein distinctively framed that maverick streak in Baltimore's literary arts which even today blooms as unexpectedly as Bradford pears up Charles Street.Certainly generations of these poetic "culture workers" (a term popularized by the late and much admired Baltimore poet Joe Cardarelli)