New & Briefly Noted

New & Briefly Noted

Mark Jackley kindly sent me a copy of his LANK, BEAK & BUMPY, in a beautiful letter press design from Iota Press. Short imagistic poems here please with such lyrics as:

“Moon” is round and cool
on my tongue,
a pearl.

And also in “January”:

Small pile of snow
in shadows

for weeks,
fist of hard

thoughts
left over

from
last year.

***

Natalie Goldberg passed Carl Kavadlo’s DARK VISIONS on to me. The strongest works here are the short poems, like the senryu we can all relate to:

there are few noises
sweeter than a car alarm
shutting itself off.

And there is the writerly haiku:

a single poem:
you are as rare as a day
in dark alaska.

***

Tracy Koretsky’s collection EVEN BEFORE MY OWN NAME (Ragged Bottom Press) has a particularly vivid haiku:

the sound of waves
on a moonless night
–distant friend

I like this one because it has some levels of meaning. At first it seems the poet is listening the the sound of waves in the dark and thinking of a far-off friend. But as I read it again I began to feel it was the sound of the waves that truly was that distant friend.