HELIOTROPE (<L. & Ger.) 1. a name given to plants of which the flowers turn so as to follow the sun. 2. a green variety of quartz with spots or veins of red jasper. 3. a new journal, a perennial bed of eclectic, exciting poems.

"...reading this issue of Heliotrope, we felt part of something larger, something gently productive."
- G.W. Clift and J.E. Roper, Literary Magazine Review

Volume VII is ALIVE AND IN THE WORLD!! ...with a generous helping of poems for you to read on this site. Meanwhile, if nothing is grander to you than poetry on the actual page, dig into your pocket and fill out the subscription form.

When you get your virgin copy of Volume VII, email us if you know the title of the poem in that issue that was written by a deceased mathematician. Correct answers get a small free prize, postage paid.

Due to a continuing backlog, Heliotrope is suspending acceptance of manuscript submissions until further notice. We apologize to our eager and loyal contributors and thank you for your support.

Heliotrope, Volume VII, Spring, 2007

Rika Lesser Born in Brooklyn to parents who spoke only English to her, Rika Lesser is a poet and a translator of Swedish and German literature. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Etruscan Things (Braziller, 1983), All We Need of Hell (North Texas, 1995), and Growing Back: Poems 1972-1992 (South Carolina, 1997). At present she is preparing the manuscript of Questions of Love: New and Selected Poems for Stanley Moss of The Sheep Meadow Press - the new part seems to be done; unearthing uncollected poems, making selections and arranging the manuscript is her current preoccupation.     A celebrated translator, Lesser values her translations as highly as she does her own poems. In a Poetry Society of America interview (“What is American About American Poetry?”), she comments, “I feel as closely related to Rilke - my first real love in another language - as I do to Dickinson.” Of a dying breed of American poet/translators, she says, “These are people for whom the translation of poetry is every bit as creative and as essential to their 'practice' as writing their own poems.”     Her translations include Guide to the Underworld by Gunnar Ekelöf (Massachusetts, 1980), for which she received the Landon Poetry Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets (1982); A Child Is Not A Knife: Selected Poems of Göran Sonnevi (Princeton, 1993), for which she received the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize; poetry by Claes Andersson (What Became Words, Sun & Moon, 1996); by Rainer Maria Rilke (Rilke: Between Roots, Princeton, 1986); and by Hermann Hesse (Hours in the Garden and Other Poems, FSG 1979); as well as various works of fiction and nonfiction for adults and young people.     Her translation of Hesse’s Siddhartha will appear in the Barnes & Noble Classics Series next winter. Rika Lesser has made Brooklyn Heights her home since December 1975.

Starkey Flythe Starkey Flythe, Jr. lives in South Carolina. He worked for Curtis Publications, serving as managing editor of The Saturday Evening Post in the 1970’s. He has published two books with Ninety-Six Press and his poems have appeared in Antioch Review,Ploughshares, and The Georgia Review, among others. Lent: The Slow Fast, a collection of his short stories, won the University of Iowa Press Prize in 1990.     In addition, he has published fiction in many notable literary magazines and anthologies, including, to name a few, The Chattahoochee Review, Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2004, and The O’Henry Collection of Short Fiction--twice a contributor. He is a past recipient of the Tryon Prize and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship.     Flythe is a rich and masterful poet, one whose words have the weight of quiet integrity, a life lived, regularly spilling out into surprising realisations, apparent in "As if there was,"--looking for a sign--“as if simply being there was enough,/and the others who seem to know so much more than we do, gone on ahead, an advertisement's destination.” In Flythe's poems, ordinary things: cows in half light, a broken lamp become a book-end--which might, in lesser hands, have descended to the sentimental--are luminous and utterly authentic. There is not one ounce of sentimentality in these quiet, disturbing poems, richer for every re-reading.     Of his poems, Laurel Blossom says,"I find his work deceptive -- amusing on the surface, serious underneath..."