Brandi, John. Staff in hand / Wind in pines.

[San Francisco]: Tangram, 2008. Hand-sewn, 5.5×8.5″, no page numbers, no price listed. (Colophon: “One hundred fifty copies printed from Monotype English O. S. on Zerkall.”)

With thanks to the author.

The cover image, I imagine by the poet-painter himself: a line drawing of a guy under a hat with a long staff, striding along, a moon looking down over a pine branch—maybe piñon? Hello, John, and a fine greeting this lovely letterpress pamphlet of poems, starting with:

First crocus
the nearest star
a little closer.

And then I notice, in finer type across the page to my left, the “Author’s note:”

When reading these poems, consider adding longer than customary silence between them, as if they were one to a page. Think of Miles on Kind of Blue, or Monk on Bags’ Groove, a hop-dwell-skip-jump across the middle of a stream.

Oh, yeah . . . Greetings, first crocus, hey, you remind me . . .

I leave off saying any more, here, just share a couple more, as usuall, randomly selected:

Travelers gone
the sound of the ferry
rocked by the sea.

Sky darkening
I fold a letter
before the ink is dry.

About 60 more, where those came from. And a deep bow to my traveller friend from El Rito, New Mexico.

Bill

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Olson, Marian. Desert Hours.

Northfield, Massachusetts: Lily Pool Press, 2007. Art by Karen Fitzsimmons. Letterpress, sewn binding, 109 pages, 5.5×8.5″. ISBN 978-0-934714-35-8.

With thanks to the author.

Think beautiful. Think demanding, exquisite craftsmanship. Think words lifting from pages into our minds and hearts. Think “book”—in the finest examples you know of, the happiest marriage of text, type, space, and materials possible. (Think Ed Rayher at Swamp Press, and thank him for yet another stunning exhibition of his art.)

Marian Olson does not spew out haiku by the dozens to flood the desks of editors across the world, though many of the haiku and senryu in this substantial collection have been published in print and online journals and anthologies. And she graciously acknowledges several readers who helped her with “careful reading and suggestions on the working manuscript.” Thus, this book, like most well-made books, results from the careful, thoughtful work of its author coupled with a sense of community, a community of poet-friends and publishers and book-crafts people upon whom one calls for assistance with the things that matter.

Again, as is my usual practice, three poems from random openings of Desert Hours. This from page 29:

his eyes when he gives her black tulips

It is no accident that we call the active disk that controls light’s entrance into our consciousness by the name of a flower. A meditation on closely examined tulip superimposed on the iris of the eye, and all that these suggest beyond themselves, a gift. Then, from page 69:

the world having become
what it is
I plant a few bulbs

The poor we have always with us. Last millennium’s beggar in the marketplace has become today’s 24/7 cable news. Yes, we weep with Jesus. But if we do not plant? Ah, but we are not the only planters; here’s one from page 92:

wild irises!
the mountainside blues
in the early light

Understand, “blues” is a verb, here, if you hear it. See it.

And so, is that then the range? Topics from love, to world angst and meditation in the face of it all, to celebration of a glorious vision? Hardly. Here are two more to seal the deal, from pages 6 and 20:

the perfect apple
aaaaaaaon a branch
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaI can’t reach

all day circling
the one tree he knows
fledgling

The first, a self-revelatory senryu, the second a wry comment on a particular bird, on all of us, to be taken as haiku or senryu; depending on the mood in which we read it, it reads us.

In her brief introduction to Desert Hours, Olson says, among other things:

The meaning of pure beauty is looking into the moonless sky on a winter night seven thousand feet above sea level. Far from the air and noise pollution of low elevations, no other sky is like it. Moon and stars unlocked by night can bring a pragmatist to her knees.

One might be tempted to say “You had to be there!” I, too, have lived in Santa Fe and enjoyed the high desert atmosphere—my wife calls it “the place where air is made”—and might agree with that old expostulation. But, if you have memories of the place, its land, waters, sky, air, and people, you can bring them back with Olson’s book. And, if you’ve never been there, well, this collection is better than a day at the spa. All the richness of the physical landscape and the human and other lives that intertwine with it is here.

Not least, one enters Desert Hours through the portal of Karen Fitzsimmons’s striking cover portrait of a landscape, a seemingly natural melding of nearby hill, rivers in a valley plain, distant mountains, and clouds, yellow wildflowers in the foreground, and, oh yes, the remnant of a small house, or perhaps a morada, where some penitentes of the past may have contemplated the agonies of this life and the peace beyond it.

Thankfully, Marian Olson finds peace within it. But not without that sensitivity to our precarious situation which marks all true poets.

Desert Hours is available online through Santa Fe’s premiere book store, Collected Works (click on the link to see the cover, at the least!). Or it may be purchased from the author, at $22 postpaid:

Marian Olson
2400 Botulph Road
Santa Fe, NM 87505-5754

Viva Desert Hours!

Bill

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Madeleine Findlay. Shaped Water: A Haiku Year.

Portsmouth, NH: Single Island Press, 2007. 4.25×5.5″ (11×14 cm), approx 64 unnumbered pages, $14.95 from the publisher, 379 State St., 03801.

With thanks to Tom D’Evelyn.

With Shaped Water, editor, publisher and author Madeleine Findlay inaugurates her and Tom D’Evelyn’s “small press”* in fine style. From a four-color wrapper to the letterpress-printed interior in sewn signatures of deep cream Ingres paper bound in “Turner Blue” boards embossed with the book’s title, this book is a class act. Its one-to-a-page haiku, elegantly set in Pastonchi monotype by Ed Rayher at Swamp Press, speak quietly to inner places engaged with the outer world.

Some of Findlay’s haiku seem simple in the extreme, as in this almost uncommentable occurrence:

blown
across the kitchen floor
dead leaves

. . . but, on the facing page, we see that more is at stake in these poems, where each word approaches silent, subtle gesture:

out in the cold wind
I walk into my shadow
my back warm

But I have jumped ahead into winter, so let’s back up to see what we might discover in spring, toward the front of the book:

across the counter
and through a crack in the wall
snakeskin

Sounds like my grandfather’s old shed out back, where I found such things after a snowbound winter finally melted away and his worn hands sought tools for work in the soil.

This is a carefully crafted book in every dimension, a “year” to set above any other I know in haiku lately. A wonderful debut book for both press and poet. I’ll not give away any more of these poems here, but recommend that you check them out yourself. The price is low for a book of such quality, and there are only 200 to be had in this limited edition. Check it out further on the publisher’s web site: http://www.haikumuse.com/.

Bill

*Note: A “small press” is a publishing industry term that means a publisher who puts out only a limited number of books in a year, usually in editions of a thousand or fewer copies. Most purely literary publishers fit this description. Note also that the word “press” in a company name may refer to a publishing company, a printing company, or one that does both. Hence, there is nothing strange about having “Swamp Press” produce a book for “Single Island Press”. (Swamp Press also publishes fine letterpress books under its own imprint.)

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