There are many such haiku, and haiku-like poems, in Reichhold's collection. If that's all there were, it would be easy for me to deal with. I could quote and comment on the best of these poems, then treat one or two that I didn't like so much. and finish by observing that Reichholdfs book might have been even more effective had it contained only forty or fifty of his poems instead of something like 300, haiku working best, it seems to me, uncrowded.

Lavers of Content, however, is not a collection of short poems but (for the most part) a collection of renga-'like groups of them, a renga being a sequence of linked poems. The problem is that these groups fail to cohere, they lack proper unifying principles. Consequently, they are difficult to make sense of.

Collage, or the juxtapositioning of not obviously-related images, of course, is the technical basis of what Reichhold is doing. He is an excellent composer of visllal collages as evidenced by the vivid, full-color specimen hels done for the cover of his book. It is practically worth the price of the book by itself. Visual collages,however, have a large advantage over verbal collages due to the "loudness" of visual elements compared with words and phrases. Shapes and colors linger longer in the mind, and are easier to find on a page, than abstract symbols. As a result, they have more ways to organize a design (through repetition and contrast) than words and phrases do, and can operate further out ide meaning than the latter without causing scatteredness.

That too much scatteredness characterizes Reichhold's sequences can be demonstrated by almost any of them. Take, for example, the second, "Sky on String." It starts dynamically with "The dream of my hand/ shoveling soil/from sleep to awake," and ends with "There is a kite up, a boy's hand holding/sky on a string," in another of Reichhold's exhilirating climbs, this one from under-earth (and the under consciousness of sleep) into the final height of the sky. But the stanzas in between, though peppered with marvelous images like the Roethkean reference to "the mutter of damp moss," lose me. What, for istance, is meant by "stockings used to spin a net?" Or by the following stanza: "Here, would you suggest, can distance dwell?/ can one eel, trapped, be there for many?/ He fed them, from almost nothing, one in all." This is surrealistic, provocative, vital but it makes me feel dull-witted.

My rather sketchy guess is that the sequence reproduces a person's very slowly waking up, in the process breaking through clusters of dream-fragments and emerging into the grandeur and dominance of full wakefulness. This kind of thing is more than enough to make Layers of Content worth reading. But scatteredness keeps it, for me, from being the masterpiece it nearly is.

I should add here that Layers of Content has a valuable introduction by Kevin Bailey, editor of the English periodical, Haiku Quarterly, and includes perceptive comments on others of Reichhold's books by Rod Willmot, Joe Nutt, Tom Clausen, Robert Spiess and Larry Junkins--which make it all the more worth getting. It is available from AHA Books, Box 767, Gualala CA 95445 for $9 ppd.