Marianne Halley Chametzky; verse interwove pain, hope

Marianne Halley Chametzky, a feminist poet whose verse touched on the role of politics and history in shaping the human condition, died Monday at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton from complications of multiple myeloma. She was 75.

Her lyrical poetry, which included three books of verse, and her essays were published under her maiden name, Anne Halley.

''What Anne tried to achieve in her poetry was a deeper understanding of the historical and current psychological effects of life in our times, coming out of the most terrible period in history," her husband, Jules Chametzky, a retired English professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said yesterday.

Her conclusion, he said, was a belief in ''the continuity of life and that something always remains, however meager, to go on."

Ms. Halley knew about pain and suffering, just as she knew about hope and joy. As a child in Germany during the Holocaust, she and her twin sister were among the ''hidden" children of Jewish heritage.

Chametzky said they were ''protected by a Lutheran aunt in Germany who enrolled them in the school where she taught until they could join their parents in this country."

''Anne always had a rather cosmopolitan view of the world," Chametzky said. ''She always had a political and social orientation.

''Her last book, published in 2003, was dedicated to the late German artist, Kathe Kollwitz, who was always very feeling toward women and children and the victims of warfare, brutality, and oppression. Kathe was a great humanist artist."

As for her childhood experience, Chametzky said, Ms. Halley ''had a kind of survivor's guilt from the German side of her background and from the Jewish side, but she identified with the Jewish experience."

Ms. Halley's first book of verse, ''Between Wars & Other Poems," published originally by Gehenna Press of Northampton, went through three editions. An Oxford Press edition was published in 1966.

Florence Howe of New York City, who published the Feminist Press, included poetry by Ms. Halley in two anthologies. She described Ms. Halley as ''a feminist writer who also wrote about the terror of the world. She made people think of the value of freedom. She wrote about cruelty, not only of the past, but of the present. She wrote a good deal about the Holocaust and suffering all over the world, about freedom and truth-telling politicians."

She was also ''a great editor" and essayist, Howe said, and ''could also be very funny. She was comfortable with the whole range -- humor, irony, and sadness."

Ms. Halley also translated the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky's, ''Deutschland ueber Alles," as well as works by other German writers, and published fiction, verse, and essays in numerous journals.

In 1980, Ms. Halley was awarded a Massachusetts Artist Foundation Fellowship for her poetry and in 1982, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship for her story, ''The Kaiser's Horses," published in The Southern Review.

Four of her stories were listed among the 100 distinguished stories in The Best American Stories published by Houghton Mifflin.

Ms. Halley was poetry editor of The Massachusetts Review from 1977 until she retired two years ago.

She also taught part time at Smith College and UMass and in the 1980s taught American women's poetry at Frankfurt University and The Free University of Berlin. Last year she taught a bilingual poetry workshop at Humbolt University in Berlin.

Ms. Halley was born Ute Marianne Elisabeth Halle in Bremerhaven, Germany, the daughter of Dr. Max Halle and Dr. Margarethe Kohlhepp Halle. Because her father was Jewish and forbidden to practice medicine, Chametzky said, he first came to this country with his son in 1936, followed by his wife a year later, so they could be certified to practice medicine before their daughters arrived in 1938.

The family settled in Olean, N.Y., and Americanized their name to Halley.

Ms. Halley earned her bachelor of arts degree at Wellesley College in 1949. In 1951, she got her master's degree in English from the University of Minnesota, where she studied with authors Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate and assisted Henry Nash Smith.

Besides her husband of 51 years, Ms. Halley leaves three sons, Matthew Chametzky of Hamilton Township, N.J., Robert Chametzky of Iowa City, Iowa, and Peter Chametzky of Carbondale, Ill.; a brother, Dr. M. Martin Halley of Topeka, Kan.; her twin sister, Dr. Renate Duchesneau of Orange Village, Ohio; and six grandchildren.

Burial will be at Wildwood Cemetery in Amherst at 10 a.m. tomorrow with a graveside service. A memorial service is planned for the fall.