There's a twinkle in poet Susanne Dubroff's eyes, a soft smile and brightness in her laughter that belies the troubles she's seen.

She doesn't dwell on the past, or even bring it up, unless asked to by a nosey reporter. And even then, she steps lightly over the unpleasant parts of her life -- her family's escape from Nazi Germany, her parents' unhappiness in their new lives, her divorce and failed relationships -- but those events and her good humor are etched in her poetry, and permeate her latest book, The One Remaining Star.

Like 19th-century Spanish poet Gustavo Adolpho Becquer, there is a “trace of sadness” about her, but it's only a trace and it's well hidden behind her pleasant laugh.

“I guess that's why I was attracted to Becquer,” Dubroff said recently. “I was no stranger to sadness.

“There's a certain irony about it, and I'm reluctant to say this, but some of my happiest times were as a child in Germany.”

Her father, who was Russian and living in exile in Germany, built a very successful dairy import and export business and married her highly educated but poor German mother. The family lived well, with a level of comfort they would never see again after they fled. When she was 6, Hitler declared all Jews to be stateless. The family's world came crashing down.

Dubroff, who lives in Hanover, grew up in Plymouth, Mass., where the family settled after short stays in Palestine and Brooklyn, N.Y.

“My father couldn't make a go of it in Palestine, and, like so many, he thought that the streets were paved with gold in the United States. He had an even harder time in Brooklyn.

“He had relatives in Plymouth, Mass., so they moved there, bought a small grocery store, and lived on top of it. They were not very happy. I was about 10 and started in the fourth grade.”

After graduating from high school, she won a full scholarship to Boston University, where she received a degree in history and went on to get a master's degree in social work from Simmons College in Boston. She spent more than 30 years working as a psychiatric social worker and raising a family before retiring.

She started writing poetry at a young age, but she never took it seriously until much later.

“I wrote a poem when I was 9 about a cat who died. Then, when I was a teenager, I wrote horrible sonnets. I never kept any of them, but I was aware of how bad they were.”

Her first serious poem was inspired by one of her social work cases -- a single mother who was struggling to raise a brood of children in a rough part of Boston.

“I wrote a poem about the woman, and that made me start taking my writing seriously. That was in the '70s.

“I went on working because I had to, but I kept writing. I worked until retirement, and then I got more serious about getting my poems published.”

She started reading with more intensity, and she took writing and literature courses. In 1994, she self-published a small book of her poems, You and I. She also started translating European poets into English.

It was the translations that gained Dubroff her first notice. In addition to having her translations of poems published in such literary journals as The Harvard Review and The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, she gained a wider audience with her books -- a chapbook of 10 poems by Becquer called A Flower on the Volcano and a longer selection of the poems by French poet RenÐ Char titled This Smoke That Carried Us.

Now, she's receiving recognition for her own work in Poetry Magazine, Paris Review, Poetry and elsewhere, and for her book, The One Remaining Star. She talked about her work during recent interviews.

“Some people think that poetry is dead. But if poetry is dead, we're dead. It can be the language of the soul and the language of the spirit. That's what you try to do. …

“Char does something extremely difficult. He is able to look at the world, and then he brings something from deep inside to meet that. That's what I call a great artist. I don't know that I can do that, but I’d love to think that I could.

“What I tried to do with this book is talk about art. The entire third section is about artists and what their work means to me.”

Her poem about the Swiss sculptor and artist Alberto Giacometti is an example:

When Giacometti died

broached and the intruders have strange visions.

Since ladies aren't allowed in the underworld

to see what's plain enough to someone else.

Dubroff is not confident about her appreciation of modern art. There are many things that she does not understand or feel comfortable commenting on, she said. “Maybe I was feeling a little like Mrs. Giacometti when I wrote this.”

The Giacometti poem and the title poem, The One Remaining Star, also are good examples of sticking with first efforts when writing poetry, Dubroff said.

A friend found a piece of paper with the Giacometti poem crumpled on the floor where she had discarded it. She opened it, read it again and decided to keep it. “It was better than I thought it was.”

After The One Remaining Star had been accepted by Poetry Magazine, she decided to change it. The editors rejected her second effort in favor of the first. Once the poem was published, she realized they were right.

“Sometimes your first instincts are the best thing.”

Her poem, The Ruins of America, also was saved by sticking with her first inclination and not being swayed by the opinion of another.

Over the ruins of America

hang a white flag.

Over the human ruins

parched white stones.

“Someone told me that I shouldn't call it The Ruins of America, that it should be South America or Central America. I thought about that, and I started to change it to The Ruins of The Americas, but I'm glad I didn’t,” she said.

Dubroff is continuing to write, with the hope of getting another book published.

“I've been writing, and a lot of it is sort of politically tinged. I feel now that I need to translate what I've been doing into poetry.”

In The One Remaining Star, Dubroff takes a thought-provoking look at life from different perspectives. The poems are engaging, and each reading is more enriching than the last.

Here's another example:

We're dead already,

a tablespoon of ginger.