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10 December 2004. Yesterday, I got a (signed and numbered) broadside in the mail from Mad river Press. It consists of haiku by Lee Gurga, and calligraphy by Julio Granda. I feel like I'm giving away too much by quoting one of its haiku since it only contains four, but can't see away around it if I'm going to say anything about it, at all. It's the climactic haiku of the four, all of which are solitextual glimpses into life on a farm:
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from house
to barn
the milky way
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A wonderful evocation of the shortness of the distance from one end of a constellation to the other, and of the vastness of the distance from a house to a barn. Gurga's other three haiku demonstrate similar sensitivity to our place in Nature although none quite hits the high this one does (nor do many other haiku I know of). Julio Granda's calligraphy--actually, for me, a blood-red splash of abstract expressionism--is appropriately suggestive of the dawn two of the haiku are about, and maybe of a farm's lay-out, and of a curtained window that Gurga also writes of, and definitely of the milky way . . . and of the universe. In short, haiku at its best, and in its best presentation. (Available from Mad River Press, State Road, Richmond MA 01254, for $17 ppd.)
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