This week’s passages | The Seattle Times

Louise Glück, 80, an American poet whose searing, deeply personal work, often filtered through themes of classical mythology, religion and the natural world, won her practically every honor available, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and, in 2020, the Nobel Prize for literature, died Friday at her home in Cambridge, Mass. The cause was cancer.

Glück was widely considered to be among the country’s greatest living poets, long before she won the Nobel. She began publishing in the 1960s and received some acclaim in the ’70s, but she cemented her reputation in the ’80s and early ’90s with a string of books, including “Triumph of Achilles” (1985), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; “Ararat” (1990); and “The Wild Iris” (1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Her work was both deeply personal — “Ararat,” for example, drew on the pain she experienced over the death of her father — and broadly accessible, both to critics, who praised her clarity and precise lyricism, and to the broader reading public. She served as the U.S. poet laureate from 2003 to 2004.

Rudolph Isley, 84, a founding member of the Isley Brothers who performed backing vocals on the band’s 1959 classic “Shout” and remained a mainstay of the group for decades, helping to reinvent its sound with the rise of funk and disco, died Wednesday in his sleep at his home in Chicago. No cause was given.

Isley spent much of his three decades with the Isley Brothers harmonizing with his brother O’Kelly Isley in support of Ronald Isley’s lead vocals. But he also sang lead on some notable tracks. On “I’ve Got to Get Myself Together,” recorded in 1969, his gentlemanly tone gave the song a touch of grace. He also lent a suave lead to the group’s fleeting entry into the disco field, “It’s a Disco Night (Rock Don’t Stop),” which was a club hit in the United States in 1979 and reached the Top 20 in Britain.

In 1989, Isley retired from the mainstream music industry to pursue his long-deferred dream of a career in the ministry, although he continued to sing in church.

Louise Meriwether, 100, an author and activist who helped propel a renaissance of Black female writing in the 1970s with her searing novel “Daddy Was a Number Runner,” a coming-of-age story set in Depression-era Harlem, died Tuesday at a rehabilitation and nursing center in Manhattan. Her death was confirmed by the filmmaker Cheryl Hill, who cared for her in recent years and said that Meriwether’s health had declined after she contracted COVID-19 in 2020.

A stylish, evocative writer with an ear for dialogue, Meriwether was 46 when she published her debut novel, “Daddy Was a Number Runner” (1970). Published the same year as Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and a year after Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Meriwether’s novel joined a wave of books that highlighted the experience of Black girls and women, whose stories had long been marginalized or ignored in the pages of American literature.

Hughes Van Ellis, 102, one of three known remaining survivors of the massacre in which a white mob killed hundreds of Black residents in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921, died on Monday at a veterans’ hospital in Denver. The cause was cancer.

Along with Lessie Benningfield Randle, 108, Van Ellis and his sister Viola Ford Fletcher, 109, were the last known survivors of the massacre, in which a heavily armed white mob killed hundreds of Black residents and burned much of Tulsa’s prosperous Greenwood neighborhood to the ground. The killing and destruction made it one of the worst racist terror attacks in U.S. history. The destruction eradicated a thriving district known as Black Wall Street, where Black entrepreneurs owned and ran restaurants, hotels, theaters and other businesses. As many as 300 Black people were killed and more than 1,200 homes were destroyed.

In 2020, Van Ellis, Fletcher and Randle joined descendants of other victims of the massacre in filing a lawsuit seeking reparations for the losses they endured. Seven defendants were named in the lawsuit, including the city of Tulsa, the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office, the Oklahoma National Guard and the city’s chamber of commerce.

A judge ruled in May 2022 that part of the case could proceed. It was dismissed in July 2023, but the state’s high court agreed in August to hear an appeal.

Charles F. Feeney, 92, a pioneer of duty-free shops and a shrewd investor in technology startups who gave away nearly all of his $8 billion fortune to charity, much of it as quietly as he had made it, died Monday in San Francisco. His death was announced by the Atlantic Philanthropies, a group of foundations he had started and funded since the early 1980s. He lived in a modest rented apartment in San Francisco.

In December 2016, with his donation of $7 million to his alma mater, Cornell University, for student community service work, Feeney officially emptied the Atlantic Philanthropies’ accounts. It also fulfilled his pledge to give away virtually all of his wealth before he died, a rarity in the philanthropic world.

Kevin P. Phillips, 82, a political analyst and prolific author whose 1969 book “The Emerging Republican Majority” was read as an electoral blueprint for the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” to build a coalition of white people who voted largely on social and racial issues, died Monday at a hospice center near his home in Naples, Fla. The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said his son, Alec Phillips.

In what many considered a cynical calculation, he recommended that Republicans not dilute the Voting Rights Act because “the more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”

Terence Davies, 77, a British screenwriter and director known for his poetic, intensely personal films including “Distant Voices, Still Lives” and literary adaptations such as “The House of Mirth,” died Oct. 7 at his home in the village of Mistley, Essex, on the southwest coast of England. The cause was cancer.

Davies made his feature debut as writer-director in 1988 with “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” a dreamlike — sometimes nightmarish — collage of a film that evoked a childhood of poverty and violence leavened by music and movie magic. The film won the Cannes International Critics Prize in 1988 and, in 2002, it was voted the ninth-best film of the past 25 years by British film critics.

“The House of Mirth,” starred Gillian Anderson in an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s classic and won the prize for best British Film at the 2001 British Academy Film Awards. Davies’ final film, “Benediction,” was based on the life of World War I soldier and poet Siegfried Sassoon.

Michael Chiarello, 61, a TV-ready chef from California’s Central Valley whose culinary prowess and intuitive knack for marketing helped define a chapter of Italian-influenced Northern California cuisine and the rural escapism of the Napa Valley lifestyle, died Oct. 6 in Napa. His death, in a hospital, resulted from an acute allergic reaction that led to anaphylactic shock. The cause of the allergic reaction is unknown.

Russell Batiste Jr., 57, a pyrotechnic drummer and scion of one of New Orleans’ most celebrated musical dynasties, whose furious style and genre-busting approach provided the rhythmic pulse for bands like the Meters and Vida Blue and musical artists like Harry Connick Jr., died of a heart attack on Sept. 30 at his home in LaPlace, La., outside New Orleans.