Sarasvati Scapes
London: Pendas Productions, 2001
ISBN 0-92082-042-5
C$20.00 paperback

Saravasti Scapes is both a small book (69 pages) and a CD by poets Penn Kemp and Angela Hryniuk about their experiences on pilgrimages to India . It is written in both prose—at once incisive, riveting and profound, with poetry both subtle and philosophical by both poets.

Penn and Angela are well known poets. Penn has been writing poetry and producing what she calls sound poetry in which poets voices intermingle or there are instrumental or song elements such as in this CD since the early 80s. She has also had 20 books of poetry published and five plays produced, as well as numerous CD’s and essays.

Dream Flow
Poems by David Jaffin 
Exeter: Shearsman, 2006
ISBN 1-90570-014-8
312 pp., US$15.00 paperback 

Dream Flow is a substantial collection of David Jaffin’s work–this time with a wonderful watercolor by Charles Selinger brightening up the cover. As any reader of this blog knows by now, I’m a fan of Jaffin’s miniature songs and recommend this book highly. At 311 pages, it’s an inexhaustable well in which one can gaze and dip at one’s liesure, bringing the reflective waters to the lips and trying out songs like these:

Lake reed

s
with the

watering
tiouch of

bird’s wing
ed from re

lease.

Delights and Shadows
Poems by Ted Kooser
Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 2005
ISBN 1-55659-201-9
96 pp., US$15.00 paperback

Ted Kooser is the current U.S. Poet Laureate, joining the politically inclusive ranks of Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Rita Dove, the Roberts Hass and Pinsky, Billy Collins and his immediate predecessor, Louise Gluck. “The Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress serves as the nation’s official lightning rod for the poetic impulses of Americans” it says on the Library’s website. If Kooser’s Delights and Shadows, which won a 2005 Pulitzer Prize, has caught the national electricity, it very effectively conducts it into the ground.

He is fully in the tradition of American plainspeak poetry begun by Whitman and Thoreau and brought into a suburban context by William Carlos Williams, who, besides his major opus about life in Paterson, New Jersey, wrote fish-out-of-water poems about his foreign vacations. (Thoreau was so quintessentially American he felt no need to leave the country. “I have travelled widely in Concord, Massachusetts,” he said.)

NOON: journal of the short poem
Issue Three, Spring 2006
Philip Rowland, Ed., Pub.
Noon Press (Tokyo, Japan).
77 pages, Japanese stab-bound;
ISSN 1349-6972
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A physically beautiful production always, Noon is a delight to hold in the hands. The gray and cream washi papers truly make this book a treat to linger over–which is exactly the strategy of the editor: Philip Rowland asks that extra time be spent over these short-short poems and sequences so that subtleties of nuance can be teased out. Noon Three doesn’t disappoint: among the many well-known names Thomas A. Clark, Carlos Louis, Theodore Enslin, and Alan Halsey give us memorable pieces. The Yin/Yang award for most natural crazy-cloud writing goes to Edward Baker–

moths
just
beyond
glass

splattering
on

and:

far beyond frog moon leaps

ma(I)ze Tassel Retrazos
a collaborative collection of collagic images created by Carlos M. Luis
with corresponding textual interpretations by Derek White
New York, NY: Calamari Press, 2005
ISBN: 0-9746053-9-5
44 pages; hand printed and saddle-stapled;
B & W and color illustrations.

Structured in the fashion of an eighteenth century gothic novel, with each chapter preceded by a descriptive title, this publication at first would seem to follow a traditional aesthetic. But this is both the beginning and the end of any nods to the traditional as this work goes boldly forth to break unproven ground. Materials used include ink, magazine cutouts, and found textiles.

Within these pages we are greeted by virtuous displays of pla(y)giarism, a Raymond Federman innovation, that perhaps describes the underlying ethic at work. We are treated to panels of images, all related albeit tangentially to the textual weaving at work. And weaving is the proper term for this collaborative collection that uses the weaving of fabric as its residing metaphor. The name in the title, Retrazos, a Spanish term meaning ‘retrace’ or ‘stencil’, referring to the remnants left behind by a seamstress, is a word not chosen by some arbitrary selection; its action connects every piece in this title into a whole creation as the seamstress connects her swatches of fabric. The tale begins with the opening phrase, “It started out as a hole in my mother’s courtyard.”