Transfer

by Naomi Shihab Nye

"In the current literary scene, one of the most heartening influences is the work of Naomi Shihab Nye. Her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life."— William Stafford

Dusk

where is the name no one answered to

gone off to live by itself

beneath the pine trees separating the houses

without a friend or a bed

without a father to tell it stories

how hard was the path it walked on

all those years belonging to none

of our struggles drifting under

the calendar page elusive as

residue when someone said

how have you been it was

strangely that name that tried

to answer

Naomi Shihab Nye has spent thirty-five years traveling the world to lead writing workshops and inspire students of all ages. In her newest collection Transfer she draws on her Palestinian American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her extensive travel experiences to create a poetry collection that attests to our shared humanity.

Among her awards, Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and four Pushcart prizes. In January 2010, she was elected to the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.

Genres: Poetry, Middle East, Adult

128 pages, Hardcover

First published August 23, 2011

About the author

Naomi Shihab Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Jordan, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her B.A. in English and world religions from Trinity University. She is a novelist, poet and songwriter.

She currently lives in San Antonio, Texas. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010.

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book of poems is in memory of Nye's father, who passed away shortly before she wrote them. Some of them are actually composed based on pages he had written, with an entire section she attempted in his voice. He was a Palestinian who came to America after losing his home to Israeli occupation, so those themes are prevalent.

My favorites:
When One is So Far from Home, Life is a Mix of Fact and Fiction
(you can see a YouTube version combining imagery from Howl's Moving Castle to the poem read aloud)

For Mutanabbi Street

"A single sentence which mesmerized one mind
for hours will not be seen again, in that edition,
will not be found tucked into a bookshelf
of the friend we will not meet
on the street we will not know.

What blows to pieces goes fast.
They'll give it names,
successful mission,
progress in security.

What lingers long - quiet hours reading,
in which people were the best they hadn't been yet,
something was coming,
something exquisitely new,
something anyone might do,
and the paper flicker of turning."

[Stephen Kiernan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love this poet but not this book.

That's especially hard to write because the material is so personal: the aging and death of her father, and how his fate expresses a wrong in the world. I wanted so much to be moved.

Instead the political parts feel polemic. And the personal parts have a strange flatness that her work normally does not possess for a single line.

If you don't know this poet's work, please check her out. Brilliant and compassionate.

[Elizabeth A · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read several poems by the author that I've loved, but for some reason my library system didn't have the collection I wanted to read, so I tried this one instead.

This collection is a homage to her father and her grief at his death. There is much here that is universal, and I especially liked the ones that dealt with the immigrant/exiled man her father became after leaving Palestine.

I copied some of the lines into my journal, and there were times I stopped reading because I was stunned by the imagery evoked, but overall this is not a collection I loved. I say that knowing full well that poetry is not my usual fare, so the fault might be all mine, and there I'll leave it.

[Nancy Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Processing her grief after her father died

[Marwa Aldaraweish♛ Aldaraweish♛ · Rating 4 out of 5]

The strength of Transfer relies in Naomi Shihab Nye’s attempt to speak for herself, father, mother, family and entire world to memorialize her father’s death for eternity or as long as people can read. In reading Transfer and analyzing some of Nye’s poems, it is almost impossible to read any outside the context of her father’s death. It is also difficult to distinguish between the speaker or poem’s persona and the poet; this notion has marked her poetry with sense of originality, honesty, and individuality, which her readers can recognize and relate to easily. The poet’s honesty in expressing her grief allows the readers to go through her journey of pain. It formed a balanced understanding of death in refugee and the significant of a homeland, which is accessible for immigrants through food, memory, and storytelling.
Furthermore, this book also highlights the need for closure, especially in chapter three where Nye tries to reply to some of her father’s notebook lines, which existed when he was gone. The poet’s dual Arab-American identity attracts a wider range of readers to a personal narrative in which she addresses grief as a universal theme. The poet also is exposed since childhood “to art and culture” through her father “Aziz Shihab” who “was an immigrant from Palestine, a refugee” (Nye PBS). Thus, I recommend this book for those who are interested in contemporary poetry, and want to know more about the Middle East culture and political views. This book praises the power of words and poetry; it has kept a father alive in words and given his daughter a chance to mourn him in poetry. The poet’s tone goes through confusion, denial, and reaches acceptance by generational communication through notebooks, by poetry, and ultimately that produces a published book to reach another and wider generation; it is a circle of life and poetry.

[Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is touching without being sentimental, instructive without being didactic, illuminating and at the same time humble. The list of poems in that I enjoyed, and sometimes found myself not only enjoying but thinking about long after a first encounter, is long, including

"Scared, Scarred, Sacred"
"Many Asked Me Not to Forget Them"
"Fifty Years Since I Prayed or Thought in Arabic"
"Knowing"
"Thirsty"
"Where Are You Now?"
"Footstool"
"WAR is RAW Backwards and Forwards"

I could probably take issue with the redundancy of some of the themes and scene-types. But this book's reflections on her father, losing him, his emigration and resulting longing, and their connection (of blood and of culture) are vivid, resonant, and alternate between tough and sweet without being sentimental. More than that, though, Nye's capacity through their specific relationship to make real the power of memory, gratitude and exclusion -- of/for a person and a culture -- linger, fulminate, connect, pain and beautify.

[Bill DeGenaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and moving cycle of poems by Nye, many about her recently deceased father. Readers meet Aziz Shihab in such intimate ways: some poems use lines from Aziz's journals as titles, some are written in his voice, some are about his final days, and many more capture his lifelong love and longing for Palestine and his gentle ability to talk to his colleagues and friends about the Mideast.

[Miranda · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems hit me really hard and I felt wildly emotional reading this book. Considering there isn't really a day that I don't think about my own parents' mortality, this collection felt especially personal to me.

[jmjester · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am never disappointed in her poetry.

[Holly Socolow · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book of poetry by an American living treasure, by Naomi Shihab Nye (otherwise known as NSN). I had the great fortune to hear her speak at a local college nearly a year ago and bought three of her books without knowing anything about them other than meeting the author herself who was so full of humanity it spilled over onto everyone she touched.

This is a collection of love poems in tribute to NSN’s father, a Palestinian-born American, who was unceremoniously ousted from his homeland in the 1948 war. It is not political in the sense that we hear on the news, but on the personal level. Of a man who has lost his homeland and has done the best he can in a new world, with an American wife and family and job and community, and forever missing his birthplace, his homeless home.

The fabric of everydayness is what NSN specializes in. A grocery list written in her father’s hand, with the curl of “o” and “I” intrinsic to Middle Eastern writing. A passing conversation. A humorous memory, his illness and health. These fragments that represent a thread to another time and a man who was her entire world. Some poems I found very moving and some did not resonate at all. Some left me feeling tired of her grief and for a long time the book sat on my night table unfinished.

There were only two pages to go and it took me nine months to read them. In those two pages, more narrative, helped to contextualize what came before and fall away any filters I had unknowingly had on while reading. It is above all about love, inclusivity, the yearning for peace when it is senseless to fight. The picture on the back cover of the author at 8-years old with a look of purest delight as she and her father look right into the camera and at us, the reader. It warms my heart as much as the magic of the words.

[Peggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just read this book for the second time, cover-to-cover, in one sitting. It's a grief-struck elegy to a man we've met in Nye's previous poems--her father. Some of the poems were "found" from notes he scribbled to her in the hopes of co-writing a book. The poems are full of tenderness. They gently expose the ruminations, the marks, the imprints that carved both their lives. How he shaped her by virtue of being her father into a glorious, word-loving poet with one of the biggest hearts I've read, an all-encompassing compassion, a story-teller like himself. When he mourned and why. It's like opening a vault into a spiritually advanced light and becoming irradiated with it and you feel your own heart grow, soaking up the purity, beginning to dwell upon love instead of anger, pain, resentment, all the negative emotions that define our lives these days. A poetic feast I did not know I needed.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Naomi is, quite simply, a master. These poems are so rich, so important, so lovely. I admire most especially the way in which the poems orbit the tragic loss of her ill father while simultaneously interrogating and excavating the politics of Israel and Palestine (and the US, for that matter) in so doing. An important book of poems that I will revisit time and time again, with so many lines that touched me deeply. Lines like, "Everyone in a body is chosen/for trouble and bliss." Or, my favorite, "There's a way not to be broken/that takes brokenness to find it." It's my great honor to be studying with Naomi this semester at the Michener Center. She is a living legend in my book, and in the books of many others.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful collection of poems by the Arab-American poet about her relationship with her father and with the Middle East in an age where America has involved itself in two wars in the region for nearly a decade. I would recommend Nye’s book to anyone who enjoys contemporary poetry—not only are her topics timely and pithy, her poetics are overall top-notch and there’s a lot to love about her style of writing. She not only finds the perfect balance between personal narrative and universal experience, but she also conveys a sense of chaotic vastness, a feeling of looking out across tarmac, across sand, airplanes leaving for other cities, people you may never meet again.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Naomi Shihab Nye is a true Texas Troubador, and plays guitar enough to prove it. But I'm talking about the poems now. She is one of our national treasures. And "Transfer" is a beautiful, slightly haunting, collection about the loss of her father. Something that has not happened to me yet, and yet looms for me, sadly.

There were one-liners that took my head off. She deals head-on with xenophobia, and what it means to have a homeland, while living in exile.

This is a book for quiet nights… when we know we're going to have to get up again the next day and head back out into the world, going about the work… once again… of trying to save it… one simple gesture at a time...

[Courtney Ferriter · Rating 4 out of 5]

** 3.75 stars **

This collection centers on physical and metaphorical place. The metaphorical has to do with the poet's place in the world after her father's death. The collection is largely a tribute to his life - who he was, the places he loved, and who she is now that he is gone.

I found these poems mostly accessible and often moving (especially the ones about her grief over her father's death). Some of the poems did not seem thematically related to the others, however, and I was unsure of how they fit into the volume as a whole.

Overall, I would recommend this collection to anyone who enjoys poetry, whether you are a casual or an avid poetry reader.

[Scott Wiggerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Naomi Nye can do no wrong, and this moving tribute to her father (and the dead) is no exception. Some of the poems even use titles provided from her father's notebooks--and are spoken in her father's voice. The bond between daughter and father is strong, loving, and--at times--exasperating, but it's the love that most shines through. As always, the poems intermix the personal and the political with the wisdom Nye seems to write so readily in lines like "There's a way not to be broken / that takes brokenness to find it."

[Patti K · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed her latest collection of poems. It begins with a series of poems about
her father. He had recently died. She connects with the past and the old country
of Palestine. The poems are very moving and intimate, almost as if the reader
were reading the poet's diaries. She is masterful and never disappoints.

[Isla McKetta · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a rawness to this book and to the grief that is very honest, but I almost wanted it all to be one step farther removed. The language is beautiful and I enjoyed learning from the way she wrote.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nye reflects movingly on the loss of her father and on his loss of his homeland (Palestine). Not every poem connected for me, but those that did really stopped me in my tracks.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Naomi is my favorite poet. Almost all poems in this book were written, I would guess, as a way of grieving for her father and for Palestine.

[Chris Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorites:
- Thirsty
- The Burn
- Strict
- Moment
- Burlington, Vermont
- We Can't Lose
- WAR is RAW Backwards & Forwards

[EB · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grief, love, and a tribute to her father and displaced Palestinians everywhere.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book from one of my kids, who read it in high school or college. The poems all center on the author's father, and some on his death after a long illness. He is a Palestinian who came to the US as an immigrant or refugee shortly after Israel was formed in the 1940's or 1950's. He married an American, the author's mother, who doesn't figure much in this body of work. The pain passed on to the next generation by the father who lost his much loved home and homeland is palpable. It makes for tough, though good, reading for a Jewish American like me. It isn't clear to me why her father has this longing that transmitted to her when my grandparents who were equally displaced (from Hungary) did not. Perhaps it was the personal expulsion rather than the displacement by war and policy - my grandparents had no desire to stay with neighbors who were happy to see them exterminated. I am personally conflicted in many ways about Israel (and have never visited), but never probably to the extent of a non-Jewish American. So I felt resistance when reading some lines - someone else more passionate about Israel might have felt inflamed. But I think it's important to confront and interrogate my own resistance. And many of the poems are simply about missing her father, about the things he loved, about his own feelings of displacement. Overall, the poetry is relatively transparent, as poetry goes, rather than opaque, and for someone like me who doesn't read much poetry that was welcome. The language is beautiful (and the author is well known and much published in the poetry world).

[Katherine Dunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is a good collection of poetry that talks about the importance of self. She is an author who is writing about her ancestry and the importance of accepting what makes us each unique and special. I think this could be similar to a literature circle, but students pick a poem from the collection and then can talk about it, so other peers can hear about more poems without having to read all of them.

[Tom Romig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Her poems can be playful, mournful, nostalgic...but always beautiful. Certainly her Palestinian heritage infuses her work, but her reach encompasses far wider worlds, both exterior and interior. Her poems about her father are full of love and gratitude, dwelling not on loss but on what she had and what she still has of his rich life.

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. Just beautiful. Naomi Shihab Nye writes about love and grief like no one else. So many of these lines have been rattling around in my brain for the last month, and I expect they will keep rattling.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Why was someone else's need for a home
greater than our own need for our own homes
we were already living in? No one has ever been able
to explain this sufficiently. But they find
a lot of other things to talk about."

[Rahaf · Rating 2 out of 5]

it was a good book until very last part, where the author feeds into the concept of normalization by saying we need "peace" between Palestinians and Israelis. As Ghassan Kanafani said "We don't want to coexist with the occupier, we want to be free from the occupier."

[C Reed · Rating 5 out of 5]

5+. With each of her books, my appreciation grows. If I was still teaching Global studies I would use her last writing about her dad in the curriculum. “River of Waiting”
“What Will Happen”. “Morning birds”

[Bethany Reid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love, love, love her work. This book is a tribute to her father, the journalist Aziz Shihab. Beautiful and thoughtful.