Book Reviews LYNX XXI:1,February, 2006

If you can imagine a pile of books in an inverted pyramid with the largest book on top graduating down to the smallest and thinnest one, you will be able to see the order of this issue’s book reviews. This allows my progress down the stack to seem more impressive as I finish off, and lay aside, the larger books. This means there is no division between haiku and tanka books, an ever-more blurry partition anyhow as authors combine the forms.

Red Rock Yellow Stone: Journeys from Yellowstone to the Painted Desert. Photographs by Edwin Firmage. Perfect bound, 14 x 11 inches, 80 full color photographs with haiku by Japanese masters and Edwin Firmage. ISBN: 0-9765693-1-0. $34.95. Contact.

Edwin Firmage has skated out on the thin ice of self publishing and produced such a professional and amazing work of art as a book that only the disingenuous would hold his methods against him. A two-time recipient of the Printing Industries of America Benjamin Franklin Premier Printing Award, Firmage has had his work crowned with the highest praise. He and his work can only serve as a shining example to others.

From the cover artwork, (see above) it is not ‘merely’ a photograph with the calligraphy and changing focal points, to the Yellowstone forest of gold on the last page, the photographs are so astounding, I often found myself absolutely unable to breathe. The large format of the pages, and of Firmage’s camera, bring scenes of some of the most beautiful areas of United States to lay them across one’s lap. The richness of color, the accuracy of focus, the detail, all add up to the feeling that if one slightly relaxed the hold on reality, one's person, as well as mind and spirit, could be transported into these places. How delightful to visit these places without the long drive, the heat, the flies and biting gnats, and the tripod tipping over in the wind.

When I saw that the book contained haiku that accompanied the photographs, my heart clinched as I thought, "Oh dear, now he is going to ruin this lovely photo book with amateurish translations, and surely even worse - he own attempts at haiku." To my great relief and delight though, Firmage presents his haiku without caps and punctuation. He has been as well acquainted with haiku as he is with photography. His choices of haiku from the Japanese are so apt, the reader gets the feeling that the haiku was written, not by an author centuries and an ocean away, but by a recent visitor to the site. Not only does he borrow the poems from Issa, Buson, Basho, Shiki and lesser known Japanese haiku writers, he also writes his own haiku which could stand toe-to-toe with any other author in English.

The haiku are given their due with exactly the right size and weight of a font, and placed creatively, but also in a way that they are easy to read, if one can draw one’s eyes away from the photographs. By graying and softening repeated images, the pages also carry the poems in Japanese calligraphy as an element of the composition. Each page has been laid out to emphasize the photo material integrated with the haiku and information of the place where the photo was made. Perfect. Open any page and there is joy, vision, and delight for the taking. No words of praise are good enough for this beautiful book.

Edwin Firmage lives in Salt Lake City so he is completely at home in the parks and places of beauty in all their seasons. How fortunate we are that he, too, has found the connections between photography and haiku. If you own a camera and write haiku, you owe it to yourself to get this book for the pleasure and inspiration it will give you.

In 2000 and 2004, Scott Watson had two articles on his translations of Santoka published in the Tohoku Gakuin Review under the titles "Weeds We’d Wed" and "A Life to Live." What the readers will find in this book, are these two journal pieces, without revision or changes, along with the introductions. The cover of the book has an ink wash calligraphy and illustration by Ed Baker.

The first article "Weeds We’d Wed," begins with the story of how Scott Watson discovered the work of Taneda Santoka, both in English and then through Japanese friends in a poetry seminar. The translation by Cid Corman which as Watson notes, "is more Corman than Santoka" left him searching for versions that better compared to his own. Those of John Stevens’s work came under his scrutiny, as well as the work published online by several sites and translators (not named, but should have mentioned Hiroaki Sato). Watson’s own versions of the translations then appeared in the now discontinued US haiku magazine Persimmons.

The article continues with a brief biography of Santoka’s life taken from the Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. What the encyclopedia avoids saying is that Santoka was an alcoholic who then drifted from job down to lower job, was divorced, and ended up traveling around as a mendicant Zen priest, begging from friends and writing travel diaries.

Watson then uses a page to describe and analyze Santoka’s poetry and ends with his relationship to Zen poetry. Watson uses a Zen approach to translating the poems into a non form – giving them the number of words or lines as the spirit moves him. Thus, he ends up with such haiku:

Some of the poems have copious explanations of Japanese culture or terminology in rambling streams of consciousness that may be helpful to some readers.

The second article begins with Watson’s views on translating, expressing his disregard for academic translators (though he earns his living teaching and does translations). He makes the valid case for poets doing translation so that the versions in the target language come out as poetry (a concept with which I can agree), but then slides off into worthless ruminations about whether Santoka "actually wanted to be read in English." Due to an evident Santoka boom in Japan, Watson chimes in on his psychological assessment of the poet which results in Watson blaming Santoka’s mother for his genes (when Santoka’s father was the drunkard who sold off the family inheritance to support his addiction). None of this dims Watson’s admiration for the work of Santoka, who he places "as one of the best haiku poets in twentieth century Japan, or anywhere else in any other time frame." It seemed to me that Watson identifies with Santoka which may or may not make his translations relevant. There are fifty poems in this book.

A few years ago, when I first became acquainted with Geert Verbeke, we exchanged packets of books. In one thick package was his Dutch version of Jokerman. Dutch poems I can sometimes slowly translate, with a well-thumbed dictionary, but to read the haibun in Dutch was beyond my capabilities. So, imagine my surprise and delight to know that Geert has, himself!, translated the whole book into English.

He begins by warning the reader that "this is a haibun book, not a fortune-telling book, and certainly not the prayer book of the devil. No, this book is only written to have a good time." This Geert writes with due high glee. The photo on the back shows a heavily bearded gentleman wearing a straw hat and a loving look in his eyes with a mischievous grin. He has written a meditation book, poetry albums, fairy tales, a book on jazz, four books on singing bowls and three (maybe four now – read on down the book reviews) books of haiku. He is serious about his writing and his poetry, but he lives with a lightness that Basho would envy.

The book finally gets down to business with a bit of history about the Tarot and an explanation of the suites – all well seasoned with interjections of Geert’s own haiku. Among this information is the revelation that Verbeke has collected playing cards his whole life. Not only complete decks are in his possession, but he has rescued lost and found cards in trains, airports, restaurants and other public places resulting in over 600 various cards. Verbeke seems to have an uncanny connection to the various cards and is able to give them a meaning that sometimes coincides with the tarot and at other times is simply his take on the card.

In spite of the disclaimer, the book has possibilities for being used for divination. All you need to do is to draw a card from the deck, look up Verbeke’s compilations about the meaning of the suite, and then proceed to the individual card. Lacking a deck of playing cards, I flip open the book to:

travel without fear, move up and down between glaring contrasts and contradictions. Move between the mud huts from Tanzania and the desert tents from Tunisia. Move between woodlands and snowy canyons. The world is yours. Have the power to transform you anger into enlightenment. You and I united in painful loss with bated breath, in sweet dreams and expectations. The drinks go down easily, another little French brandy will take the strain.

I burst into a roar of laugher, your wall is a fool’s paper. Your graffiti have pretty colours. Thanks for your funny stories about pure gain and painful tattoos. Don’t put on a mask; let’s poke fun at the lady next door. Tell her about the thousand cats you saw in Istanbul, tell her about the horses in Mongolia, sing your love songs. Deep inside your bar-talk, I can feel that there are plenty of storms on every ocean. Hear Chris Rea on slide guitar, dancing down the stony road.

Whether this accurately describes me or my day is rather beside the subject. The glory is in following Verbeke’s mind as he wanders in and out of reality and especially the way the haiku relate to the subject matter of the prose.

After reading so many books of haiku and tanka, I must say it was with great relief to come upon a book of haibun. The combination of prose and poetry in this short form seems to me to be a just-right solution for both forms. The prose, whether straight narrative style, or even better, in Kimmel’s way of treating the prose with the same degree of repeats and patterns of poetry, it becomes a marvelous foil for the poetry. The mind can race along, gobbling up new information and inspiration and then, at the end, with a haiku or tanka, curl up and ruminate and digest it all. Just when the reader gets comfortable with this process, Kimmel wisely changes the pace and opens the piece with one or two haiku and then takes the reader to the place that generated the emotion.

Whatever Kimmel has learned about writing haiku and tanka, he uses to give his haibun that exact amount of twist. In the story "Goldfish, Blue Heron, and Man" the prose part is treated as if it is the first two lines of a haiku even though there are twelve lines to the story part. The haiku juxtaposes the right amount of twist so the mind is whisked off to think about something else that has little to do with goldfish and dollar bills.

For persons who find haiku too quick or tanka too dense, they should read and then write haibun. The works of Larry Kimmel are some of the best currently being written in English and are an excellent place to start.

Here is a small sample taken from "Evening Walk" a journal-like entry that combines each paragraph with a haiku or tanka.

"The heat still rises from the fields and road mingling the essences of grass and dust. I enjoy these solitary walks after a day of manuscripts and notes.

See how expertly he leads the reader to think he is only taking an evening walk to get away from the daily grind of work? Then in the haiku he whips the picture around so another completely different image and idea for his need for a walk, need to get away, and need for grass and dust. Excellent work. This is only paragraph from one work. Each is a good as the next. This book, a river years from here, is a constant surprise and joy.

While some persons, eager to have their poetry look like "real" poetry will consider only the perfect bound book, Kimmel has the courage to give his readers a book that lies flat when it is opened. The page stays where it is wanted so the reader can leave the current favorite poem on the desk, available for even the briefest glimpse. The warm ecru paper with just the right amount of ink on the letters, invites the eye to return often.

Because collections of ghazals and or sijo are so rare, Tree Riesener’s Liminalog is a must-have for anyone interested in these forms. Aside from that reason, Riesener’s work is very good, and is another reason for ordering this book.

The combination of these two genres makes for an interesting mix for the book. If the ghazals are too long for you (she has really long lines in each of her sher), you can always turn your head and grab a quick sijo or two on the facing page. Her leaps, in both forms, are expert and extremely entertaining. This woman is honest and exact so she can sometimes astound the reader with her candor. The first page has a dream about a coupling with the sacred white bull of Dis so be prepared for an adventure!

For stylists, I can tell you Riesener usually follows the repeat with the same or a similar word so you can tell she understands the rhyme and the reason of ghazals. Because her lines are so long and the subject matter varies so widely (as it should), you almost forget you are reading a ghazal until that last word in the couplet comes into your eyeball, wiggling and laughing at its own virtuosity.

Tree Reisener is a thinking woman with her own strong opinions. Therefore, in poems such as "The Passion of the Christ, the Movie," her measured leaps heap unspoken critique that almost by-pass observation. With twenty-seven poems in the book, you get a lot to think about, much to be inspired by, and hopefully, the idea that maybe you should be writing either ghazals or sijo. She makes the form look easy! See?

If the priest blessed chocolate cake and coffee,
would it become the body and blood?

The title here does not carry the impact that the graphic does on the cover of this book because there, the word ‘moon’ cleverly has a part of one of the o’s missing. What is left of that "o" is a golden crescent new moon beside the full moon of the second "o." I love the idea that all our poetry is a part of the moon or is something broken off of that heavenly body and loaned to us for our writing. Perhaps this is the idea that inspired Michael McClintock to write in his foreword: ". . . Dyck’s craftsmanship and vision transform familiar imagery and the ordinary occasions of life into moments of mystic, luminous awareness. . ."

This is a beautiful explanation of what Marji Dyck does with her poetry. Though A Piece of the Moon is ‘only’ her second book, her work exhibits skills and ability that make me wish I had been reading more of her poems. She has been published in many anthologies and is the winner of several haiku and tanka prizes.

In A Piece of the Moon with ten pages of haiku, three to a page, the reader gets an adequate feel for the level and range of Dyck’s haiku. The verses are printed without caps and punctuation with small elegant ink sketches of birds and a spider, by the author.

It is interesting to note that when the section on tanka begins, the illustrations are discontinued only to reappear later in the section of haibun. The tanka are arranged two to a page. Though the tanka are not really a sequence, the paired poems on each page always have some faint hint of connection between them. An example might demonstrate this better:

the heavy flight
of two pelicans
windborne –
for two days you have not smiled
nor reached to touch me

the rustle
of autumn wind
trailing through reeds
some kind of longing
from out of nowhere

A Piece of the Moon closes with ten haibun using haiku. Maybe this explains the return of the illustrations? I suspect that I am like many readers of poetry, I always want to know about the author and that life which has inspired the poems, so I was appreciative of the haibun as they gave me brief glimpses of this Canadian woman’s existence.

The series of haiku in New England Country Farmhouse arise out of Watkins’s fascination with the movie The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane and with a nearly morbid fixation on the actress Jodie Foster. In fact the book is dedicated to her on her fortieth birthday. With the opening illustration a grinning jack-o-lantern over a crossed umbrella and cane, the spooky atmosphere is established. Already on the first page the corpse appears next to the jelly glasses in the cellar and the thirteen-year-old girl begins to celebrate her birthday on Halloween. I do not believe Basho had in his mind the idea of haiku being used to "tell" such a story (or any narrative, for that matter), but I suspect the old guy would enjoy Watkins’s tale and I am sure he would find Watkins’s capability for writing mature and skillful.

The second sequence, "A Thousand Leaves" follows with eight more haiku of gothic horror. I felt the impact of the production was greatly spoiled by adding on, at the end, another version Watkins had attempted to get published with LeRoy Gorman, but after a year of negotiations, the deal fell through. Evidently Gorman tried to revise some of Watkins’s haiku; an offer of help that was rejected, and yet, here in the back are these revised versions. Most of the revised section, I preferred to the original. Wouldn’t it have just been simpler to publish the work using the revised poems substituted for the originals? Maybe this will happen with a reprint?

Amelia Felden is now the official translator of Yuhko Kawano’s work. In the past three years Felden has brought out books in English that include parts of Kawano’s manuscripts – Fountains Play and Times Passes (2002), reviewed in Lynx XVIII:1, and Vital Forces (2004), reviewed in Lynx XIX:3, and the complete book, My Tanka Diary (2005).

Kawano Yuhko was born in 1946, and at the age of twenty-three she won the Kadokawa literary prize for her tanka sequence, "Cherry Blossom Recollections," which was then included in her first book, Like a Forest, Like a Beast. Over the years she has continued to be a professional poet while also being wife to the scientist/poet, Dr Nagata Kazuhiro, and mother of two children in Kyoto. There the couple heads the prestigious Tower Association of Contemporary Tanka and they publish the group’s monthly journal with the same name.

For the translation of As Things Are, Felden has been joined by Kozue Uzawa, who immigrated in 1971 to Canada where she received a Ph.D from the University of British Columbia. Kozue published her first collection of tanka, In Canada, in 1998. She has been vital in the establishment of the Tanka Society of Canada and now serves as Editor on its journal – gusts.

As Things Are opens with a very concise introduction to translation and to tanka. The whole book is worth its cost for Felden’s quotation of Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) definition of a tanka: "It is a poem with a middle only; its beginning lies in the poet’s actual experience, and its end, if any, has to be sought in the reader’s mind. It is a piece of life captured verbally."

Tucked away in the introduction is the origin of the poems in this book. Evidently, another poet, by the name of Manaka Tomohisa, compiled the book under the title of Gems of Poetry by Kawano Yuhki. Thirty years of Kawano’s work, in ten books, were reduced to one hundred of this poet’s idea of her best work. The poems appear under the title of the book so that at first glance the reader could feel that these are sequences with a title. A closer reading reveals that Manaka did in fact make sequences. Here is the first one in the book.

standing on your head
you
were gazing at me –
just that one summer
it happened

with all kinds of thoughts
about Jesus
who became a young man
in the village of Nazareth,
I closed St Matthew’s Gospel

on the afternoon
it was decided I should
take time off school,
my doctor suddenly, softly
to me ‘read the Book of Job’

I find the poems of Yuhko Kawano to be valid and understand why these several people are working so hard to bring her tanka poetry to a wider audience. There is a sensitivity and larger spirit of the woman that permits her to reveal her innermost feelings without sounding self-centered. By her revelations, she becomes a part of all humankind as she gives us the words for the most important things in our lives – those that have no terms for them.

The book closes with a translation of an essay, also presented in Japanese, by Manaka Tomohisa, telling of the experience of how the book, Gems of Poetry by Kawano Yuhki, came to be and how he found working with Amelia Felden on this translation.

I love it when we see one poet being inspired by another. As result of reading Robin Gill’s book of translation of Japanese poems about flies titled, Fly-ku, in Geert Verbeke there was unleashed a virtual torrent of poems about flies. In fact the output was so impressive, that Gill, when doing a second edition of Fly-ku, added several pages of Verbeke’s work. The Bzz in the title of this book refers to the half of the book with Verbeke’s selection of his haiku about flies.

The Miauw in the title heads the section of the book with 147 haiku in Dutch, English and French about cats. And there you have just learned how to pronounce your second word of Dutch!

Now things get a bit complicated. If you look at the book and see the title as Miauw & Bzz, with a sweet altered photo of a cat, you would think I had made a mistake with the title. As you would read through the book up to about page 85 you would think the printer made a collating error. The pages are suddenly upside down. If you turn the book over, the title again becomes Bzz & Miauw and the cover photo is one of nine flies. Here you will read that there are 135 haiku in Dutch, English, French with some in South-African, Italian, Croatian, Irish, Swedish, Serbian and Slovenian.

Verbeke has cleverly made two books in one and yet each is complete. This man is simply overflowing with ideas and he has the energy and drive to make his dreams a reality. In almost every issue of Lynx, there is a review of his newest book. In this one are two! Some people are turned off (probably jealous) by his output, but I find it exciting to be a witness to his joy and creativity. You already know I admire his haiku greatly and find his translations to be bordering genius so I will spare you my latest song of praise for his writing. PS: the illustrations that grace each poem are a hoot. I love how the cat goes from smiling to frowning on facing pages. Verbeke is again having fun with whatever he does.

As I have said before, I do admire the way Verbeke is able to translate so close to word-for-word that the reader can feel as if all three versions are understandable.

Several times Lynx has published reports of some of Alec Finlay’s renga activities in the British Isles along with the resulting renga. However, it wasn’t until I read the book, Shared Writing, that I really understood the scope and the great worth of Finlay’s projects. There is so much to admire about the way Finlay works and the things he does, that it is a little hard to know where to begin to explain it to you.

First is what he calls "the platform" or "plattie" which he designed. As you can see in the picture, it is a stage or temporary dwelling of douglas fir slightly elevated above the ground. Rising from each of the four corners are study posts. Near the top, these are connected to stabilize the structure and to hold rolled up bamboo screens. The top is open to the sky. From the photos I would guess the whole thing is about ten feet by ten feet and equally as high. The photo here that I have borrowed from the book was taken at Homestead along the Hadrian wall between Scotland and England.

The amazing thing is it is possible to completely disassemble this platform, load all the parts into a red van and to truck it to a specific site where in less than an hour, a couple of guys (Mo and Gerry are often mentioned as the muscle men) can reassemble it. Once, when the rare Scottish sunshine got too intense, the guys were able to carry the whole thing over into some shade. The platform has been put up and down so often in the last four years, that they say it is on its third set of connector bolts.

On the platform are scattered pillows and (so it appears in one photo) a writing stand for the renga scribe. An important part of the accruements is a metal teapot. The sessions are fueled with green tea.

Thus Finlay goes from place to place at the invitation of groups or outdoor park events, setting up his platform, brewing tea and teaching renga to people who never thought they were interested in poetry or capable of writing a poem. He teaches them (from the reports he seems a natural teacher) about renga in a gentle, nurturing way. A hokku is offered by invitation and then everyone attending begins writing a possible wakiku. After about ten minutes, or when most are done writing, the verses are read aloud and either the group or Finlay decides the best links for the poem. As he shows the group why he picks one verse over another, they are automatically learning how renga works.

For outdoor events Finlay has found the nijuin, the modern twenty-link form, (basically a han-renga or short renga with two extra links) to be doable. He allows five hours for the writing of the nijuin giving fifteen minutes per link with a break for lunch. Recently, while holding longer events indoors – up to twenty-four hours, he has begun to do the hyakuin or one-hundred link renga. At present he is currently working on a thousand verse renga with 499 authors. It is good that Finlay continues the work on the senku (Japanese for "thousand verses"), started in 1979 by Carl Heinz Kurz that culminated in his book, Grosses Buch der Senku-Dichtung. Further travels and continued work on these long poems led to sequels by Kurz: Das Zweite Buch der Senku-Dichtung and Das Dritte Buch der Senku-Dichtung (1991). May the works of Finlay be so fruitful.

Now to get to the book, Shared Writing. Evidently it is the companion book and continuation of the book, also published by Finlay, a retired publisher (who seems to be still able to make a lovely book) titled, Verse Chain: Sharing Renga and Haiku. Shared Writing is so well planned and paced that the reader barely notices how marvelously and thoughtfully the material is arranged. There are no stuffy introductions, forewords or prefaces, but the material simply flows (so it seems – this means a professional has done the work) from photo, to light purple title, to descriptive text, to the resulting renga. Sometimes Finlay sets the scene with words telling of where and how a specific event was held, and sometimes one of the participants gives a brief, and often personal, account of what it was like to learn to write a renga in this setting. These personal accounts ground the poems in the reality of settings and situations and indicate that Finlay gives the various participants a chance to have their say and to shine.

The book has color photos liberally integrated with the texts, as well as a photo album of full page photos made at various renga writing sessions.

When I first read of Finlay’s work, I was uncomfortable with him giving himself the title of renga master, mostly because the concept of a renga master had been such decisive and destructive influence on renga (called then "renku") in the States. However, as I read of Finlay’s work and see how he works, I have only highest praise for him and feel he has rightly earned the title.

Alec Finlay deserves the title of Renga Master for more than developing this new way of encouraging people to even consider writing a renga. He has introduced a new concept which I feel will open renga up to a wider audience and help the present participants of renga take on the egolessness that should be one of our goals. I have tried to do this by using italics and roman fonts for the partners in a renga instead of initialing each verse with the author’s name, but he takes the concept one step further.

Finlay does this by listing the participants in the renga in the beginning under the title (as is normal) but then shows no "ownership" of the links. Thus, no one knows who wrote which link. An even greater step has been made since Finlay’s work in the schools with students. There, instead of a person writing a link and offering it for the renga, the individual links were often written in collaboration. We have seen this before in renga, but the difference is, Finlay encourages this single verse collaboration and he does not then disfigure the renga with a double or even triple set of initials.

Thus, even the person who only makes the tea or offers one word or image, is given credit for working on the renga. What a beautiful idea and a marvelous attitude to bring to renga writing. With this kind of spirit behind this project to bring renga writing to a larger group, the form becomes loved and admired as the participants look back with great fondness on the experience they had learning and writing renga. By reading the renga in Shared Writing, it is obvious the quality of the renga produced (over sixty so far) has not been compromised. In fact the opposite has happened. The poems shine with laughter and obvious joy.

At the time of writing the book, the platform was at Dharmavastu, a Buddhist retreat in Cumbria where other persons are following Finlay’s example with continuing renga sessions. Another renga platform, in a permanent version (with a roof), called woodland platform, is part of the Hidden Gardens in Glasglow, Scotland.

Letters in Time: Sixty Short Poems by Michael McClintock. Hermitage West:2005. Softbound, 5.25 x 6.75, 78 pages, ISBN: 0-9770239-0-X, US$10, CAN$13. Contact.

Hermitage West is a private foundation, headed by Michael McClintock, that has a publishing program that encourages new directions in the developments of the short poem in English. Letters in Time is Michael McClintock’s first book of short poems in the tanka style. The sixty poems are set one to a page, in 12 point, slightly above center, alone except for the repeating header of the author’s name and a page number at the bottom. Occasionally in the book, sprinkled without connection to the previous or following five-liner poems, will be haiku written in three lines.

Since McClintock follows no form for the genre of tanka, some of the five-line poems are very short, closely approaching haiku with the amount of information, rhythms and subject matter, as well as handling. An example would be:

While the following example would not be an acceptable haiku, due to its lack of factualness and the addition of opinion, its very briefness calls its form decision into question. The only saving factor is the necessary change of time in the second part to the past tense, but it does not save the poem from being a poorly written haiku.

The reader can however find such examples that prove that McClintock does understand the principles of tanka writing.

The volume is dedicated to Karen Jeanne Harlow and the glossy cover carries her portrait, in orange, brown and yellow, as a sketch in charcoal by Nancy A. Knight done in 1996. From a close reading of Letters in Time, and the several references to falling in love, it is possible to add double meanings to such poems as this one.

apart,
our love’s a thrush
we carry in thought
light as the air it sings
within the dark

crumb moves the ant by geri barton. Saki Press:2005. Chapbook, 5.5 x 4.25, 32 pages. A Virgil Hutton Haiku Memorial Award Chapbook Contest Winner 2004-2005. Saki Press, 1021 Gregory Street, Normal, IL 61761.

It is amazing what one can learn from a small haiku book. I had known and worked with Geri Barton over the years and yet never knew that she was born in the Bronx, New York or lives on Long Island. I love it when authors put a bit of biography in the back of the book; and it is even better when a photo is there also. Some poets feel the reader should only have the poems – that there is nothing else that really needs to be said, but when I can attach the poems to a face and a person, they seem grounded and all of us is then connected.

I like, too, the title of this book. It is so typical of the psuedo science of haiku that reports what is seen without regard for scientific knowledge. There is a childlike charm in thinking that it is the crumb that draws the ant – an idea that has its own validity – regardless of what is going on in the ant.

The haiku in this collection are all worthy of winning in a contest. Many have been previously published, but beyond that, Geri Barton has been around long enough, has been writing enough haiku that she knows what she is doing and does it very well.

It was very comforting to get this book of Geri’s haiku and to know that she is still writing and publishing. May her tribe increase!

First, let me get a mild peeve out of the way. I find Kerouac’s insistence on writing haikus, an insistence he shared with his friend, Allen "Howl" Ginsburg, annoying. Both writers knew better, especially Kerouac. Regina Winreich, in her introduction to Book of Haikus, makes much of Kerouac’s study and knowledge of the form. Without getting into an essay on the Beats I think that the "s" on haiku has much to do with their sometimes infantile need to be, well, just that, irritating. If that is the case my annoyance was the point. Now they can sit back and smile smugly at this square who gets upset by the letter "s."

Or could that Anglo/American plural have something to do with this, taken from one of Kerouac’s notebooks?

Then I’ll invent
The American Haiku type:
The simple rhyming triolet: -
Seventeen syllables?
No, as I say, American Pops: -
Simple 3-line poems

Well, did Kerouac, better known for his prose, especially the American classic On the Road, and dropping (finally!) the question of that "s," achieve an "American Haiku type:"? I think not. The only thing particularly "American" about these haiku/senryu is the occasional subject.

Of course, any haiku written in America, in an American voice, dealing with an American view or place, named or not, is, in one sense, and "American" haiku.

But we have no new Yankee hybrid in this book, just (just!) marvelous haiku, rather traditional, in the final analysis, written by a master of the form who happens to be an American. but, in spite of being a square, I applaud the attempt at creating that hybrid even as I feel it was doomed from the outset. I think Kerouac himself realized this. Ms. Weinreich implies as much. On the fly-leaf of the book, and again in the introduction, is another quote. "I propose that the ‘Western Haiku’ simply say a lot in three short lines in any Western language. Above all, a haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella." I can see Basho nodding his head.

Indeed, Kerouac ends the above quote by paying homage to the master, Here is a great Japanese Haiku that is simpler and prettier than any haiku I could every write in any language.

A day of quiet gladness –
Mount Fuji is veiled
In misty rain (Basho) (1644-1694)"

The Book of Haikus is both introduction and celebration, lovingly put together by Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich. Collecting and bringing out a selection of Kerouac’s haiku, much of it previously unpublished, was long overdue. Ms Weinreich is to be congratulated. She has added to the canon of American literature.

There should be a name for that phenomenon of memory which combines and associates one event in one's life with sound, scent or scenery and when experiencing that sensory impression stimulates once again a succinct, palpable memory of the event. Proust, I think, would know along with Murasake Sagano what that word would be. Sagano's new collection Haiku Flowers and Trees (Distributed by Kamogawa Shuppan, Published by Win-kamogawa, Kyoto, Japan, 2005) reminds me how such an ordinary thing as color, or the way a blossom bends out from a tree or flower, can indeed not only stimulate a memory of an event but can, in fact, ultimately become a symbol of that event until they are, in the mind of the poet, one and the same, interchangeable, inextricably linked.

This collection has an invaluable introduction by David McMurray who published most of the haiku in Asahi Haikuist Network column. The book is illustrated beautifully by Taiki. Just as the illustrations illuminate the haiku, each haiku illuminates the poet's sensibilities and sensitivities:

The flowing passage of time is embedded, too, in her haiku; I believe the poet understands T. S. Eliot's cryptic yet magical statement "The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time":

This is when the eye of the poet sees all and the voice of the poet says just enough, leaving mystery. Sangano's haiku exemplify this intimate yet mysterious vision leading the reader down the path of exploration and delight:

Fall & Winter 2005 Haiku Harvest - Journal of Haiku in English, Volume 5 Number 1, published - online & print Denis M. Garrison, Editor.

In this issue of HAIKU HARVEST, 53 poets from 14 countries are included. Haiku Harvest is dedicated to publishing and promoting haiku, both in the western tradition of classical haiku and in all related forms, including tanka. We give generous space to poets so they can demonstrate the range of their haiku and we promote innovative ku by providing a showcase for poetry in new forms that are serious attempts to assimilate the haiku tradition in forms within the English poetic tradition. Besides the online digital edition, a print edition is also published. It is a paperback book, 6"x9", 160 pages, perfect bound, 60# cream interior paper, black and white interior ink, 100# white exterior paper, full-color exterior. ISBN: 1-4116-6770-0. Available online for purchase. Haiku Harvest has been publishing since Spring 2000.

Contemporary Sijo: An Introduction to the Classic Korean Verse Form featuring Marcyn Del Clements, Rynn Jacobs & Kim Unsong. Published by Nocturnal Iris, R.W. Watkins, Editor with Bill West and Kim Unsong as Creative Consultants. Subscriptions$12 for three issues. Box 111, Moreton's Harbour, NL Canada A0G 3H0.

Contemporary Sijo takes up where Sijo West, published by Dr. Larry Gross and Elizabeth St Jacques, left off when publication was stopped several years ago. Watkins actually opens his zine with a page from Gross's definition of the form which he feels is due him because he was owed issues of Sijo West that were never published. Then Watkins launches into five and one half pages of his ideas of how the sijo should be written and printed in English. It seems most of Watkin's examples are taken from Sijo West (it is hard to think that most of these were published almost ten years ago - 1996-97) and he seems unaware of the online sijo scenes on various outlets. He asks more questions than he answers (a good point, I think) and there is plenty of room for this magazine to grow. Watkins, thank goodness seems to be out-growing his previous abrasive personality, has done a very good job of giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the sijo form of poetry and creating a useful and enjoyable magazine. By bringing translations of traditional Korean sijo by Kim Unsong, as well as the sijo by Rynn Jacobs (so modern they border on "punk sijo" - if there is such a category) and more traditional work by Bill West and Marcyn Del Clements, Watkins gives his new readers a good overview of what is possible in sijo. He well deserves our attention and our subscriptions to his newest magazine which joins the companion zine of Contemporary Ghazals.

Michael Dudley's newest book, Pilgrimage, by Red Moon Press, of minimal haiku has been released. ISBN:1-893959-55-4, $16.95.

In The Japan Times, Sunday, September 25, 2005, David Burleigh reviewed Harue Aoki's book A Woman's Life (previously review in Lynx). Burleigh, who is more at home with haiku, was cautious with any praise and stuck to telling his readers about the subject matter of A Woman's Life, which also seemed to baffle him. Anyhow it was good seeing a single-author tanka book getting so many column inches in The Japan Times.

Last, the saddest news: In a letter from Yoshio Koganei, we learned that his Mother, Sumiko Koganei, had died in her sleep in the night of December 2nd, 2005. Not only did I share an active correspondence with Sumiko-san, but had reviewed her book, Three Trees.


TABLE OF CONTENTS XXI:1 February, 2006		LYNX A Journal for Linking Poets



	Red Rock Yellow Stone: Journeys from Yellowstone to the Painted Desert. Photographs by Edwin Firmage. Perfect bound, 14 x 11 inches, 80 full color photographs with haiku by Japanese masters and Edwin Firmage. ISBN: 0-9765693-1-0. $34.95. Contact. The Santoka Versions by Scott Watson. Sasaki Printing and Publishing Co. Sendai, Japan: 2005. Flat-spined, 7 x 9 inches, ISBN: 4-915948-41-2, US$10.00. Contact Boygirl Press, 3-13-16 Tsurugaya-higashi, Miyagino-ku, Sendai 983-0826 Japan. Jokerman: haibun about playing cards by Geert Verbeke. Published by Cyberwit.net, India: 2005. Perfect bound, glossy gated cover, 5 x 8 inches, 96 pages. Contact. a river years from here by Larry Kimmel. Winfred Press, 364 Wilson Hill Road, Colrain, MA 01340 :2005. Spiral bound, 8 x 5 inches, 50 pages, ISBN:0-9743856-8-9, $7.50 postpaid (for overseas shipping, add $2). Liminalog by Tree Riesener. The Inmates Run the Asylum Press: 2005. Saddle-stapled, 5 x 8 inches, 30 pages, full color glossy cover. Contact the author at 211 Poplar Ave., Wayne, PA 19087. A Piece of the Moon by Marje A. Dyck. Calisto Press:2005. Saddle-stapled, 5 x 8 inches, 42 pages of haiku, tanka and haibun, Foreword by Michael McClintock, ink illustrations by the author, ISBN:0-9739249-0-x, CAN$5. US$7. Contact Calisto Press, 7 Richmond Place No., Saskatoon, SK Canada, S1K-1A6. New England Country Farmhouse. Haiku by R.W. Watkins with an introduction by G.B. Jones. The Poetical Perspectives Series by Nocturnal Iris Publications: 2005. Saddle-stapled, 24 pages, 5 x 8 inches, ISBN: 0-9733510-0-4. As Things Are: Tanka poetry by Kawano Yuhko. Translated by Amelia Fielden and Uzawa Kozue. Ginninderra Press: 2005. Saddle-stapled, 5.75 x 8 inches, 36 pages, US$15. includes air mail postage from Australia. Contact Amelia Fielden, 20A Elouera Ave., Buff Point NSW 2262, Australia. Bzz & Miauw by Geert Verbeke. Perfect bound, 4 x 8.50 inches, 160 pages, black and white illustrations, ISBN: 90-77408-10-X. Contact. Shared Writing: Renga Days by Alec Finlay. An anthology of nijuuin and hyakuin renga and renga days on the renga platform, 2002 –2004. Platform projects by Morning Star, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Baltic Center for Contemporary Art. Perfect bound, 4.75 x 7 inches, 128 pages, color photos throughout, ISBN: 0-9546831-4-5. Contact Alec Finlay. Letters in Time: Sixty Short Poems by Michael McClintock. Hermitage West:2005. Softbound, 5.25 x 6.75, 78 pages, ISBN: 0-9770239-0-X, US$10, CAN$13. Contact. crumb moves the ant by geri barton. Saki Press:2005. Chapbook, 5.5 x 4.25, 32 pages. A Virgil Hutton Haiku Memorial Award Chapbook Contest Winner 2004-2005. Saki Press, 1021 Gregory Street, Normal, IL 61761. Book of Haikus by Jack Kerouac. Penguin Poets:2004. $13. Reviewed by Don Ammons *Haiku Flowers and Trees.* Distributed by Kamogawa Shuppan, Published by Win-kamogawa, Kyoto, Japan, 2005. Reviewed by Marjorie Buettner *Fall & Winter 2005 Haiku Harvest* - Journal of Haiku in English, Volume 5 Number 1, published - online & print Denis M. Garrison, Editor.** Contemporary Sijo: An Introduction to the Classic Korean Verse Form featuring Marcyn Del Clements, Rynn Jacobs & Kim Unsong. Published by Nocturnal Iris, R.W. Watkins, Editor with Bill West and Kim Unsong as Creative Consultants. Subscriptions: $12 for three issues. Box 111, Moreton's Harbour, NL Canada A0G 3H0. Michael Dudley's newest book, Pilgrimage, by Red Moon Press, of minimal haiku has been released. ISBN:1-893959-55-4, $16.95. In The Japan Times, Sunday, September 25, 2005, David Burleigh reviewed Harue Aoki's book A Woman's Life (previously review in Lynx). In a letter from Yoshio Koganei, we learned that his Mother, Sumiko Koganei, author of Three Trees, had died in her sleep in the night of December 2nd, 2005.	BOOK REVIEWS Jane Reichhold If you can imagine a pile of books in an inverted pyramid with the largest book on top graduating down to the smallest and thinnest one, you will be able to see the order of this issue’s book reviews. This allows my progress down the stack to seem more impressive as I finish off, and lay aside, the larger books. This means there is no division between haiku and tanka books, an ever-more blurry partition anyhow as authors combine the forms. Red Rock Yellow Stone: Journeys from Yellowstone to the Painted Desert. Photographs by Edwin Firmage. Perfect bound, 14 x 11 inches, 80 full color photographs with haiku by Japanese masters and Edwin Firmage. ISBN: 0-9765693-1-0. $34.95. Contact. Edwin Firmage has skated out on the thin ice of self publishing and produced such a professional and amazing work of art as a book that only the disingenuous would hold his methods against him. A two-time recipient of the Printing Industries of America Benjamin Franklin Premier Printing Award, Firmage has had his work crowned with the highest praise. He and his work can only serve as a shining example to others. From the cover artwork, (see above) it is not ‘merely’ a photograph with the calligraphy and changing focal points, to the Yellowstone forest of gold on the last page, the photographs are so astounding, I often found myself absolutely unable to breathe. The large format of the pages, and of Firmage’s camera, bring scenes of some of the most beautiful areas of United States to lay them across one’s lap. The richness of color, the accuracy of focus, the detail, all add up to the feeling that if one slightly relaxed the hold on reality, one's person, as well as mind and spirit, could be transported into these places. How delightful to visit these places without the long drive, the heat, the flies and biting gnats, and the tripod tipping over in the wind. When I saw that the book contained haiku that accompanied the photographs, my heart clinched as I thought, "Oh dear, now he is going to ruin this lovely photo book with amateurish translations, and surely even worse - he own attempts at haiku." To my great relief and delight though, Firmage presents his haiku without caps and punctuation. He has been as well acquainted with haiku as he is with photography. His choices of haiku from the Japanese are so apt, the reader gets the feeling that the haiku was written, not by an author centuries and an ocean away, but by a recent visitor to the site. Not only does he borrow the poems from Issa, Buson, Basho, Shiki and lesser known Japanese haiku writers, he also writes his own haiku which could stand toe-to-toe with any other author in English. An example of Firmage’s work: may day – the sky too is blooming elk graze a golden meadow, storm clouds lowering The haiku are given their due with exactly the right size and weight of a font, and placed creatively, but also in a way that they are easy to read, if one can draw one’s eyes away from the photographs. By graying and softening repeated images, the pages also carry the poems in Japanese calligraphy as an element of the composition. Each page has been laid out to emphasize the photo material integrated with the haiku and information of the place where the photo was made. Perfect. Open any page and there is joy, vision, and delight for the taking. No words of praise are good enough for this beautiful book. Edwin Firmage lives in Salt Lake City so he is completely at home in the parks and places of beauty in all their seasons. How fortunate we are that he, too, has found the connections between photography and haiku. If you own a camera and write haiku, you owe it to yourself to get this book for the pleasure and inspiration it will give you. The Santoka Versions by Scott Watson. Sasaki Printing and Publishing Co. Sendai, Japan: 2005. Flat-spined, 7 x 9 inches, ISBN: 4-915948-41-2, US$10.00. Contact Boygirl Press, 3-13-16 Tsurugaya-higashi, Miyagino-ku, Sendai 983-0826 Japan. In 2000 and 2004, Scott Watson had two articles on his translations of Santoka published in the Tohoku Gakuin Review under the titles "Weeds We’d Wed" and "A Life to Live." What the readers will find in this book, are these two journal pieces, without revision or changes, along with the introductions. The cover of the book has an ink wash calligraphy and illustration by Ed Baker. The first article "Weeds We’d Wed," begins with the story of how Scott Watson discovered the work of Taneda Santoka, both in English and then through Japanese friends in a poetry seminar. The translation by Cid Corman which as Watson notes, "is more Corman than Santoka" left him searching for versions that better compared to his own. Those of John Stevens’s work came under his scrutiny, as well as the work published online by several sites and translators (not named, but should have mentioned Hiroaki Sato). Watson’s own versions of the translations then appeared in the now discontinued US haiku magazine Persimmons. The article continues with a brief biography of Santoka’s life taken from the Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. What the encyclopedia avoids saying is that Santoka was an alcoholic who then drifted from job down to lower job, was divorced, and ended up traveling around as a mendicant Zen priest, begging from friends and writing travel diaries. Watson then uses a page to describe and analyze Santoka’s poetry and ends with his relationship to Zen poetry. Watson uses a Zen approach to translating the poems into a non form – giving them the number of words or lines as the spirit moves him. Thus, he ends up with such haiku: wind blows its way to sea. deep in night. alone or jazz noise won’t get you where a sutra will Some of the poems have copious explanations of Japanese culture or terminology in rambling streams of consciousness that may be helpful to some readers. The second article begins with Watson’s views on translating, expressing his disregard for academic translators (though he earns his living teaching and does translations). He makes the valid case for poets doing translation so that the versions in the target language come out as poetry (a concept with which I can agree), but then slides off into worthless ruminations about whether Santoka "actually wanted to be read in English." Due to an evident Santoka boom in Japan, Watson chimes in on his psychological assessment of the poet which results in Watson blaming Santoka’s mother for his genes (when Santoka’s father was the drunkard who sold off the family inheritance to support his addiction). None of this dims Watson’s admiration for the work of Santoka, who he places "as one of the best haiku poets in twentieth century Japan, or anywhere else in any other time frame." It seemed to me that Watson identifies with Santoka which may or may not make his translations relevant. There are fifty poems in this book. Jokerman: haibun about playing cards by Geert Verbeke. Published by Cyberwit.net, India:2005. Perfect bound, glossy gated cover, 5 x 8 inches, 96 pages. Contact. A few years ago, when I first became acquainted with Geert Verbeke, we exchanged packets of books. In one thick package was his Dutch version of Jokerman. Dutch poems I can sometimes slowly translate, with a well-thumbed dictionary, but to read the haibun in Dutch was beyond my capabilities. So, imagine my surprise and delight to know that Geert has, himself!, translated the whole book into English. He begins by warning the reader that "this is a haibun book, not a fortune-telling book, and certainly not the prayer book of the devil. No, this book is only written to have a good time." This Geert writes with due high glee. The photo on the back shows a heavily bearded gentleman wearing a straw hat and a loving look in his eyes with a mischievous grin. He has written a meditation book, poetry albums, fairy tales, a book on jazz, four books on singing bowls and three (maybe four now – read on down the book reviews) books of haiku. He is serious about his writing and his poetry, but he lives with a lightness that Basho would envy. The book finally gets down to business with a bit of history about the Tarot and an explanation of the suites – all well seasoned with interjections of Geert’s own haiku. Among this information is the revelation that Verbeke has collected playing cards his whole life. Not only complete decks are in his possession, but he has rescued lost and found cards in trains, airports, restaurants and other public places resulting in over 600 various cards. Verbeke seems to have an uncanny connection to the various cards and is able to give them a meaning that sometimes coincides with the tarot and at other times is simply his take on the card. In spite of the disclaimer, the book has possibilities for being used for divination. All you need to do is to draw a card from the deck, look up Verbeke’s compilations about the meaning of the suite, and then proceed to the individual card. Lacking a deck of playing cards, I flip open the book to: "TWO OF DIAMONDS Key words: involved – aware – helpful – persistent. ♦ 2 Dear Two of Diamonds, travel without fear, move up and down between glaring contrasts and contradictions. Move between the mud huts from Tanzania and the desert tents from Tunisia. Move between woodlands and snowy canyons. The world is yours. Have the power to transform you anger into enlightenment. You and I united in painful loss with bated breath, in sweet dreams and expectations. The drinks go down easily, another little French brandy will take the strain. after gulping down so many drinks a lift failure I burst into a roar of laugher, your wall is a fool’s paper. Your graffiti have pretty colours. Thanks for your funny stories about pure gain and painful tattoos. Don’t put on a mask; let’s poke fun at the lady next door. Tell her about the thousand cats you saw in Istanbul, tell her about the horses in Mongolia, sing your love songs. Deep inside your bar-talk, I can feel that there are plenty of storms on every ocean. Hear Chris Rea on slide guitar, dancing down the stony road. the lady next door naked at the bus stop – Alzheimer’s" Whether this accurately describes me or my day is rather beside the subject. The glory is in following Verbeke’s mind as he wanders in and out of reality and especially the way the haiku relate to the subject matter of the prose. a river years from here by Larry Kimmel. Winfred Press, 364 Wilson Hill Road, Colrain, MA 01340 :2005. Spiral bound, 8 x 5 inches, 50 pages, ISBN:0-9743856-8-9, $7.50 postpaid (for overseas shipping, add $2). After reading so many books of haiku and tanka, I must say it was with great relief to come upon a book of haibun. The combination of prose and poetry in this short form seems to me to be a just-right solution for both forms. The prose, whether straight narrative style, or even better, in Kimmel’s way of treating the prose with the same degree of repeats and patterns of poetry, it becomes a marvelous foil for the poetry. The mind can race along, gobbling up new information and inspiration and then, at the end, with a haiku or tanka, curl up and ruminate and digest it all. Just when the reader gets comfortable with this process, Kimmel wisely changes the pace and opens the piece with one or two haiku and then takes the reader to the place that generated the emotion. Whatever Kimmel has learned about writing haiku and tanka, he uses to give his haibun that exact amount of twist. In the story "Goldfish, Blue Heron, and Man" the prose part is treated as if it is the first two lines of a haiku even though there are twelve lines to the story part. The haiku juxtaposes the right amount of twist so the mind is whisked off to think about something else that has little to do with goldfish and dollar bills. For persons who find haiku too quick or tanka too dense, they should read and then write haibun. The works of Larry Kimmel are some of the best currently being written in English and are an excellent place to start. Here is a small sample taken from "Evening Walk" a journal-like entry that combines each paragraph with a haiku or tanka. "The heat still rises from the fields and road mingling the essences of grass and dust. I enjoy these solitary walks after a day of manuscripts and notes. her diary – if only I hadn’t forced its tiny lock. . ." See how expertly he leads the reader to think he is only taking an evening walk to get away from the daily grind of work? Then in the haiku he whips the picture around so another completely different image and idea for his need for a walk, need to get away, and need for grass and dust. Excellent work. This is only paragraph from one work. Each is a good as the next. This book, a river years from here, is a constant surprise and joy. While some persons, eager to have their poetry look like "real" poetry will consider only the perfect bound book, Kimmel has the courage to give his readers a book that lies flat when it is opened. The page stays where it is wanted so the reader can leave the current favorite poem on the desk, available for even the briefest glimpse. The warm ecru paper with just the right amount of ink on the letters, invites the eye to return often. Liminalog by Tree Riesener. The Inmates Run the Asylum Press:2005. Saddle-stapled, 5 x 8 inches, 30 pages, full color glossy cover. Contact the author at 211 Poplar Ave., Wayne, PA 19087. Because collections of ghazals and or sijo are so rare, Tree Riesener’s Liminalog is a must-have for anyone interested in these forms. Aside from that reason, Riesener’s work is very good, and is another reason for ordering this book. The combination of these two genres makes for an interesting mix for the book. If the ghazals are too long for you (she has really long lines in each of her sher), you can always turn your head and grab a quick sijo or two on the facing page. Her leaps, in both forms, are expert and extremely entertaining. This woman is honest and exact so she can sometimes astound the reader with her candor. The first page has a dream about a coupling with the sacred white bull of Dis so be prepared for an adventure! For stylists, I can tell you Riesener usually follows the repeat with the same or a similar word so you can tell she understands the rhyme and the reason of ghazals. Because her lines are so long and the subject matter varies so widely (as it should), you almost forget you are reading a ghazal until that last word in the couplet comes into your eyeball, wiggling and laughing at its own virtuosity. Tree Reisener is a thinking woman with her own strong opinions. Therefore, in poems such as "The Passion of the Christ, the Movie," her measured leaps heap unspoken critique that almost by-pass observation. With twenty-seven poems in the book, you get a lot to think about, much to be inspired by, and hopefully, the idea that maybe you should be writing either ghazals or sijo. She makes the form look easy! See? Eucharist If the priest blessed chocolate cake and coffee, would it become the body and blood? Yes, if you cut the icing off before it is bless. And no cream. But the icing is the best part, and black coffee is not worthy of the name. A Piece of the Moon by Marje A. Dyck. Calisto Press:2005. Saddle-stapled, 5 x 8 inches, 42 pages of haiku, tanka and haibun, Foreword by Michael McClintock, ink illustrations by the author, ISBN:0-9739249-0-x, CAN$5. US$7. Contact Calisto Press, 7 Richmond Place No., Saskatoon, SK Canada, S1K-1A6. The title here does not carry the impact that the graphic does on the cover of this book because there, the word ‘moon’ cleverly has a part of one of the o’s missing. What is left of that "o" is a golden crescent new moon beside the full moon of the second "o." I love the idea that all our poetry is a part of the moon or is something broken off of that heavenly body and loaned to us for our writing. Perhaps this is the idea that inspired Michael McClintock to write in his foreword: ". . . Dyck’s craftsmanship and vision transform familiar imagery and the ordinary occasions of life into moments of mystic, luminous awareness. . ." This is a beautiful explanation of what Marji Dyck does with her poetry. Though A Piece of the Moon is ‘only’ her second book, her work exhibits skills and ability that make me wish I had been reading more of her poems. She has been published in many anthologies and is the winner of several haiku and tanka prizes. In A Piece of the Moon with ten pages of haiku, three to a page, the reader gets an adequate feel for the level and range of Dyck’s haiku. The verses are printed without caps and punctuation with small elegant ink sketches of birds and a spider, by the author. It is interesting to note that when the section on tanka begins, the illustrations are discontinued only to reappear later in the section of haibun. The tanka are arranged two to a page. Though the tanka are not really a sequence, the paired poems on each page always have some faint hint of connection between them. An example might demonstrate this better: the heavy flight of two pelicans windborne – for two days you have not smiled nor reached to touch me the rustle of autumn wind trailing through reeds some kind of longing from out of nowhere A Piece of the Moon closes with ten haibun using haiku. Maybe this explains the return of the illustrations? I suspect that I am like many readers of poetry, I always want to know about the author and that life which has inspired the poems, so I was appreciative of the haibun as they gave me brief glimpses of this Canadian woman’s existence. New England Country Farmhouse. Haiku by R.W. Watkins with an introduction by G.B. Jones. The Poetical Perspectives Series by Nocturnal Iris Publications:2005. Saddle-stapled, 24 pages, 5 x 8 inches, ISBN: 0-9733510-0-4. The series of haiku in New England Country Farmhouse arise out of Watkins’s fascination with the movie The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane and with a nearly morbid fixation on the actress Jodie Foster. In fact the book is dedicated to her on her fortieth birthday. With the opening illustration a grinning jack-o-lantern over a crossed umbrella and cane, the spooky atmosphere is established. Already on the first page the corpse appears next to the jelly glasses in the cellar and the thirteen-year-old girl begins to celebrate her birthday on Halloween. I do not believe Basho had in his mind the idea of haiku being used to "tell" such a story (or any narrative, for that matter), but I suspect the old guy would enjoy Watkins’s tale and I am sure he would find Watkins’s capability for writing mature and skillful. The second sequence, "A Thousand Leaves" follows with eight more haiku of gothic horror. I felt the impact of the production was greatly spoiled by adding on, at the end, another version Watkins had attempted to get published with LeRoy Gorman, but after a year of negotiations, the deal fell through. Evidently Gorman tried to revise some of Watkins’s haiku; an offer of help that was rejected, and yet, here in the back are these revised versions. Most of the revised section, I preferred to the original. Wouldn’t it have just been simpler to publish the work using the revised poems substituted for the originals? Maybe this will happen with a reprint? late November sigh a white feather falls softly from a birdless sky In the Gorman revisions the same poem is given as: late November sigh a white feather from a birdless sky As Things Are: Tanka poetry by Kawano Yuhko. Translated by Amelia Fielden and Uzawa Kozue. Ginninderra Press: 2005. Saddle-stapled, 5.75 x 8 inches, 36 pages, US$15. includes air mail postage from Australia. Contact Amelia Fielden, 20A Elouera Ave., Buff Point NSW 2262, Australia. Amelia Felden is now the official translator of Yuhko Kawano’s work. In the past three years Felden has brought out books in English that include parts of Kawano’s manuscripts – Fountains Play and Times Passes (2002), reviewed in Lynx XVIII:1, and Vital Forces (2004), reviewed in Lynx XIX:3, and the complete book, My Tanka Diary (2005). Kawano Yuhko was born in 1946, and at the age of twenty-three she won the Kadokawa literary prize for her tanka sequence, "Cherry Blossom Recollections," which was then included in her first book, Like a Forest, Like a Beast. Over the years she has continued to be a professional poet while also being wife to the scientist/poet, Dr Nagata Kazuhiro, and mother of two children in Kyoto. There the couple heads the prestigious Tower Association of Contemporary Tanka and they publish the group’s monthly journal with the same name. For the translation of As Things Are, Felden has been joined by Kozue Uzawa, who immigrated in 1971 to Canada where she received a Ph.D from the University of British Columbia. Kozue published her first collection of tanka, In Canada, in 1998. She has been vital in the establishment of the Tanka Society of Canada and now serves as Editor on its journal – gusts. As Things Are opens with a very concise introduction to translation and to tanka. The whole book is worth its cost for Felden’s quotation of Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) definition of a tanka: "It is a poem with a middle only; its beginning lies in the poet’s actual experience, and its end, if any, has to be sought in the reader’s mind. It is a piece of life captured verbally." Tucked away in the introduction is the origin of the poems in this book. Evidently, another poet, by the name of Manaka Tomohisa, compiled the book under the title of Gems of Poetry by Kawano Yuhki. Thirty years of Kawano’s work, in ten books, were reduced to one hundred of this poet’s idea of her best work. The poems appear under the title of the book so that at first glance the reader could feel that these are sequences with a title. A closer reading reveals that Manaka did in fact make sequences. Here is the first one in the book. Like a Forest, Like a Wild Beast (1972) standing on your head you were gazing at me – just that one summer it happened * with all kinds of thoughts about Jesus who became a young man in the village of Nazareth, I closed St Matthew’s Gospel * on the afternoon it was decided I should take time off school, my doctor suddenly, softly to me ‘read the Book of Job’ *** giving him an unripe apple, the only positive thing that I did before we parted I find the poems of Yuhko Kawano to be valid and understand why these several people are working so hard to bring her tanka poetry to a wider audience. There is a sensitivity and larger spirit of the woman that permits her to reveal her innermost feelings without sounding self-centered. By her revelations, she becomes a part of all humankind as she gives us the words for the most important things in our lives – those that have no terms for them. The book closes with a translation of an essay, also presented in Japanese, by Manaka Tomohisa, telling of the experience of how the book, Gems of Poetry by Kawano Yuhki, came to be and how he found working with Amelia Felden on this translation. Bzz & Miauw by Geert Verbeke. Perfect bound, 4 x 8.50 inches, 160 pages, black and white illustrations, ISBN: 90-77408-10-X. Contact. I love it when we see one poet being inspired by another. As result of reading Robin Gill’s book of translation of Japanese poems about flies titled, Fly-ku, in Geert Verbeke there was unleashed a virtual torrent of poems about flies. In fact the output was so impressive, that Gill, when doing a second edition of Fly-ku, added several pages of Verbeke’s work. The Bzz in the title of this book refers to the half of the book with Verbeke’s selection of his haiku about flies. The Miauw in the title heads the section of the book with 147 haiku in Dutch, English and French about cats. And there you have just learned how to pronounce your second word of Dutch! Now things get a bit complicated. If you look at the book and see the title as Miauw & Bzz, with a sweet altered photo of a cat, you would think I had made a mistake with the title. As you would read through the book up to about page 85 you would think the printer made a collating error. The pages are suddenly upside down. If you turn the book over, the title again becomes Bzz & Miauw and the cover photo is one of nine flies. Here you will read that there are 135 haiku in Dutch, English, French with some in South-African, Italian, Croatian, Irish, Swedish, Serbian and Slovenian. Verbeke has cleverly made two books in one and yet each is complete. This man is simply overflowing with ideas and he has the energy and drive to make his dreams a reality. In almost every issue of Lynx, there is a review of his newest book. In this one are two! Some people are turned off (probably jealous) by his output, but I find it exciting to be a witness to his joy and creativity. You already know I admire his haiku greatly and find his translations to be bordering genius so I will spare you my latest song of praise for his writing. PS: the illustrations that grace each poem are a hoot. I love how the cat goes from smiling to frowning on facing pages. Verbeke is again having fun with whatever he does. een zittended Boeddha op het huisaltaar de kat spint a sitting Buddha on the home-altar the cat purrs un Bouddha assis sur l’autel domestique le chat ronronne As I have said before, I do admire the way Verbeke is able to translate so close to word-for-word that the reader can feel as if all three versions are understandable. Shared Writing: Renga Days by Alec Finlay. An anthology of nijuuin and hyakuin renga and renga days on the renga platform, 2002 –2004. Platform projects by Morning Star, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Baltic Center for Contemporary Art. Perfect bound, 4.75 x 7 inches, 128 pages, color photos throughout, ISBN: 0-9546831-4-5. Contact Alec Finlay. Several times Lynx has published reports of some of Alec Finlay’s renga activities in the British Isles along with the resulting renga. However, it wasn’t until I read the book, Shared Writing, that I really understood the scope and the great worth of Finlay’s projects. There is so much to admire about the way Finlay works and the things he does, that it is a little hard to know where to begin to explain it to you. First is what he calls "the platform" or "plattie" which he designed. As you can see in the picture, it is a stage or temporary dwelling of douglas fir slightly elevated above the ground. Rising from each of the four corners are study posts. Near the top, these are connected to stabilize the structure and to hold rolled up bamboo screens. The top is open to the sky. From the photos I would guess the whole thing is about ten feet by ten feet and equally as high. The photo here that I have borrowed from the book was taken at Homestead along the Hadrian wall between Scotland and England. The amazing thing is it is possible to completely disassemble this platform, load all the parts into a red van and to truck it to a specific site where in less than an hour, a couple of guys (Mo and Gerry are often mentioned as the muscle men) can reassemble it. Once, when the rare Scottish sunshine got too intense, the guys were able to carry the whole thing over into some shade. The platform has been put up and down so often in the last four years, that they say it is on its third set of connector bolts. On the platform are scattered pillows and (so it appears in one photo) a writing stand for the renga scribe. An important part of the accruements is a metal teapot. The sessions are fueled with green tea. Thus Finlay goes from place to place at the invitation of groups or outdoor park events, setting up his platform, brewing tea and teaching renga to people who never thought they were interested in poetry or capable of writing a poem. He teaches them (from the reports he seems a natural teacher) about renga in a gentle, nurturing way. A hokku is offered by invitation and then everyone attending begins writing a possible wakiku. After about ten minutes, or when most are done writing, the verses are read aloud and either the group or Finlay decides the best links for the poem. As he shows the group why he picks one verse over another, they are automatically learning how renga works. For outdoor events Finlay has found the nijuin, the modern twenty-link form, (basically a han-renga or short renga with two extra links) to be doable. He allows five hours for the writing of the nijuin giving fifteen minutes per link with a break for lunch. Recently, while holding longer events indoors – up to twenty-four hours, he has begun to do the hyakuin or one-hundred link renga. At present he is currently working on a thousand verse renga with 499 authors. It is good that Finlay continues the work on the senku (Japanese for "thousand verses"), started in 1979 by Carl Heinz Kurz that culminated in his book, Grosses Buch der Senku-Dichtung. Further travels and continued work on these long poems led to sequels by Kurz: Das Zweite Buch der Senku-Dichtung and Das Dritte Buch der Senku-Dichtung (1991). May the works of Finlay be so fruitful. Now to get to the book, Shared Writing. Evidently it is the companion book and continuation of the book, also published by Finlay, a retired publisher (who seems to be still able to make a lovely book) titled, Verse Chain: Sharing Renga and Haiku. Shared Writing is so well planned and paced that the reader barely notices how marvelously and thoughtfully the material is arranged. There are no stuffy introductions, forewords or prefaces, but the material simply flows (so it seems – this means a professional has done the work) from photo, to light purple title, to descriptive text, to the resulting renga. Sometimes Finlay sets the scene with words telling of where and how a specific event was held, and sometimes one of the participants gives a brief, and often personal, account of what it was like to learn to write a renga in this setting. These personal accounts ground the poems in the reality of settings and situations and indicate that Finlay gives the various participants a chance to have their say and to shine. The book has color photos liberally integrated with the texts, as well as a photo album of full page photos made at various renga writing sessions. When I first read of Finlay’s work, I was uncomfortable with him giving himself the title of renga master, mostly because the concept of a renga master had been such decisive and destructive influence on renga (called then "renku") in the States. However, as I read of Finlay’s work and see how he works, I have only highest praise for him and feel he has rightly earned the title. Alec Finlay deserves the title of Renga Master for more than developing this new way of encouraging people to even consider writing a renga. He has introduced a new concept which I feel will open renga up to a wider audience and help the present participants of renga take on the egolessness that should be one of our goals. I have tried to do this by using italics and roman fonts for the partners in a renga instead of initialing each verse with the author’s name, but he takes the concept one step further. Finlay does this by listing the participants in the renga in the beginning under the title (as is normal) but then shows no "ownership" of the links. Thus, no one knows who wrote which link. An even greater step has been made since Finlay’s work in the schools with students. There, instead of a person writing a link and offering it for the renga, the individual links were often written in collaboration. We have seen this before in renga, but the difference is, Finlay encourages this single verse collaboration and he does not then disfigure the renga with a double or even triple set of initials. Thus, even the person who only makes the tea or offers one word or image, is given credit for working on the renga. What a beautiful idea and a marvelous attitude to bring to renga writing. With this kind of spirit behind this project to bring renga writing to a larger group, the form becomes loved and admired as the participants look back with great fondness on the experience they had learning and writing renga. By reading the renga in Shared Writing, it is obvious the quality of the renga produced (over sixty so far) has not been compromised. In fact the opposite has happened. The poems shine with laughter and obvious joy. At the time of writing the book, the platform was at Dharmavastu, a Buddhist retreat in Cumbria where other persons are following Finlay’s example with continuing renga sessions. Another renga platform, in a permanent version (with a roof), called woodland platform, is part of the Hidden Gardens in Glasglow, Scotland. Letters in Time: Sixty Short Poems by Michael McClintock. Hermitage West:2005. Softbound, 5.25 x 6.75, 78 pages, ISBN: 0-9770239-0-X, US$10, CAN$13. Contact. Hermitage West is a private foundation, headed by Michael McClintock, that has a publishing program that encourages new directions in the developments of the short poem in English. Letters in Time is Michael McClintock’s first book of short poems in the tanka style. The sixty poems are set one to a page, in 12 point, slightly above center, alone except for the repeating header of the author’s name and a page number at the bottom. Occasionally in the book, sprinkled without connection to the previous or following five-liner poems, will be haiku written in three lines. Since McClintock follows no form for the genre of tanka, some of the five-line poems are very short, closely approaching haiku with the amount of information, rhythms and subject matter, as well as handling. An example would be: exhibiting pack behavior the children pile stones around a secret hideout While the following example would not be an acceptable haiku, due to its lack of factualness and the addition of opinion, its very briefness calls its form decision into question. The only saving factor is the necessary change of time in the second part to the past tense, but it does not save the poem from being a poorly written haiku. biting into the peach it seemed it did kiss me The reader can however find such examples that prove that McClintock does understand the principles of tanka writing. looking left, down the street and far right, the other way, I find no one – I thought I heard her call my name in the dark The volume is dedicated to Karen Jeanne Harlow and the glossy cover carries her portrait, in orange, brown and yellow, as a sketch in charcoal by Nancy A. Knight done in 1996. From a close reading of Letters in Time, and the several references to falling in love, it is possible to add double meanings to such poems as this one. apart, our love’s a thrush we carry in thought light as the air it sings within the dark Michael McClintock is currently president of the Tanka Society of America. crumb moves the ant by geri barton. Saki Press:2005. Chapbook, 5.5 x 4.25, 32 pages. A Virgil Hutton Haiku Memorial Award Chapbook Contest Winner 2004-2005. Saki Press, 1021 Gregory Street, Normal, IL 61761. It is amazing what one can learn from a small haiku book. I had known and worked with Geri Barton over the years and yet never knew that she was born in the Bronx, New York or lives on Long Island. I love it when authors put a bit of biography in the back of the book; and it is even better when a photo is there also. Some poets feel the reader should only have the poems – that there is nothing else that really needs to be said, but when I can attach the poems to a face and a person, they seem grounded and all of us is then connected. I like, too, the title of this book. It is so typical of the psuedo science of haiku that reports what is seen without regard for scientific knowledge. There is a childlike charm in thinking that it is the crumb that draws the ant – an idea that has its own validity – regardless of what is going on in the ant. The haiku in this collection are all worthy of winning in a contest. Many have been previously published, but beyond that, Geri Barton has been around long enough, has been writing enough haiku that she knows what she is doing and does it very well. It was very comforting to get this book of Geri’s haiku and to know that she is still writing and publishing. May her tribe increase! bitter cold pilings without their seagulls with gnarled hands she twists branches for Ikebana Book of Haikus by Jack Kerouac. Penguin Poets:2004. $13. Reviewed by Don Ammons First, let me get a mild peeve out of the way. I find Kerouac’s insistence on writing haikus, an insistence he shared with his friend, Allen "Howl" Ginsburg, annoying. Both writers knew better, especially Kerouac. Regina Winreich, in her introduction to Book of Haikus, makes much of Kerouac’s study and knowledge of the form. Without getting into an essay on the Beats I think that the "s" on haiku has much to do with their sometimes infantile need to be, well, just that, irritating. If that is the case my annoyance was the point. Now they can sit back and smile smugly at this square who gets upset by the letter "s." Or could that Anglo/American plural have something to do with this, taken from one of Kerouac’s notebooks? Then I’ll invent The American Haiku type: The simple rhyming triolet: - Seventeen syllables? No, as I say, American Pops: - Simple 3-line poems Well, did Kerouac, better known for his prose, especially the American classic On the Road, and dropping (finally!) the question of that "s," achieve an "American Haiku type:"? I think not. The only thing particularly "American" about these haiku/senryu is the occasional subject. The windmills of Oklahoma look In every direction The Golden Gate creaks With sunset rust Greyhound bus, flowing all night Virginia Of course, any haiku written in America, in an American voice, dealing with an American view or place, named or not, is, in one sense, and "American" haiku. Birds singing in the dark Rainy dawn Moon behind Black clouds – Silver seas Moon in the bird bath – One star too But we have no new Yankee hybrid in this book, just (just!) marvelous haiku, rather traditional, in the final analysis, written by a master of the form who happens to be an American. but, in spite of being a square, I applaud the attempt at creating that hybrid even as I feel it was doomed from the outset. I think Kerouac himself realized this. Ms. Weinreich implies as much. On the fly-leaf of the book, and again in the introduction, is another quote. "I propose that the ‘Western Haiku’ simply say a lot in three short lines in any Western language. Above all, a haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella." I can see Basho nodding his head. Indeed, Kerouac ends the above quote by paying homage to the master, Here is a great Japanese Haiku that is simpler and prettier than any haiku I could every write in any language. A day of quiet gladness – Mount Fuji is veiled In misty rain (Basho) (1644-1694)" Six more of Kerouac’s "prettier" efforts – In my medicine cabinet the winter fly Has died of old age Full moon in the trees –across the street the jail A bird hanging on the wire At dawn Terraces of fern in the dripping Redwood shade The pine woods move In the mist Spring night the silence Of the stars The Book of Haikus is both introduction and celebration, lovingly put together by Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich. Collecting and bringing out a selection of Kerouac’s haiku, much of it previously unpublished, was long overdue. Ms Weinreich is to be congratulated. She has added to the canon of American literature. Don Ammons is an American poet and writer living in Denmark. Haiku Flowers and Trees by Murasake Sagano. Distributed by Kamogawa Shuppan, Published by Win-kamogawa, Kyoto, Japan, 2005 Marjorie Buettner There should be a name for that phenomenon of memory which combines and associates one event in one's life with sound, scent or scenery and when experiencing that sensory impression stimulates once again a succinct, palpable memory of the event. Proust, I think, would know along with Murasake Sagano what that word would be. Sagano's new collection Haiku Flowers and Trees (Distributed by Kamogawa Shuppan, Published by Win-kamogawa, Kyoto, Japan, 2005) reminds me how such an ordinary thing as color, or the way a blossom bends out from a tree or flower, can indeed not only stimulate a memory of an event but can, in fact, ultimately become a symbol of that event until they are, in the mind of the poet, one and the same, interchangeable, inextricably linked. Sunflowers . . . father hospitalized bloom of the last bud This collection has an invaluable introduction by David McMurray who published most of the haiku in Asahi Haikuist Network column. The book is illustrated beautifully by Taiki. Just as the illustrations illuminate the haiku, each haiku illuminates the poet's sensibilities and sensitivities: White crocus alone at the park vis-'a-vis The flowing passage of time is embedded, too, in her haiku; I believe the poet understands T. S. Eliot's cryptic yet magical statement "The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time": Love poem carved deep in cold stone red plum buds Nameless grave folded with its scent magnolia The contrast of color in comparison to life's fleeting moments is elegantly captured: Breezy day bluebottles in the baby's smile And at times it is the intensity of that color from nature which makes everything else pale in comparison: Rose of Sharon surface of the pond colorless This is when the eye of the poet sees all and the voice of the poet says just enough, leaving mystery. Sangano's haiku exemplify this intimate yet mysterious vision leading the reader down the path of exploration and delight: Few leaves left through the persimmon far town view Marjorie Buettner is very active in publishing tanka both online and in paper magazines. *Fall & Winter 2005 Haiku Harvest* - Journal of Haiku in English, Volume 5 Number 1, published - online & print Denis M. Garrison, Editor.** In this issue of HAIKU HARVEST, 53 poets from 14 countries are included. Haiku Harvest is dedicated to publishing and promoting haiku, both in the western tradition of classical haiku and in all related forms, including tanka. We give generous space to poets so they can demonstrate the range of their haiku and we promote innovative ku by providing a showcase for poetry in new forms that are serious attempts to assimilate the haiku tradition in forms within the English poetic tradition. Besides the online digital edition, a print edition is also published. It is a paperback book, 6"x9", 160 pages, perfect bound, 60# cream interior paper, black and white interior ink, 100# white exterior paper, full-color exterior. ISBN: 1-4116-6770-0. Available online for purchase. Haiku Harvest has been publishing since Spring 2000. Contemporary Sijo: An Introduction to the Classic Korean Verse Form featuring Marcyn Del Clements, Rynn Jacobs & Kim Unsong. Published by Nocturnal Iris, R.W. Watkins, Editor with Bill West and Kim Unsong as Creative Consultants. Subscriptions$12 for three issues. Box 111, Moreton's Harbour, NL Canada A0G 3H0. Contemporary Sijo takes up where Sijo West, published by Dr. Larry Gross and Elizabeth St Jacques, left off when publication was stopped several years ago. Watkins actually opens his zine with a page from Gross's definition of the form which he feels is due him because he was owed issues of Sijo West that were never published. Then Watkins launches into five and one half pages of his ideas of how the sijo should be written and printed in English. It seems most of Watkin's examples are taken from Sijo West (it is hard to think that most of these were published almost ten years ago - 1996-97) and he seems unaware of the online sijo scenes on various outlets. He asks more questions than he answers (a good point, I think) and there is plenty of room for this magazine to grow. Watkins, thank goodness seems to be out-growing his previous abrasive personality, has done a very good job of giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the sijo form of poetry and creating a useful and enjoyable magazine. By bringing translations of traditional Korean sijo by Kim Unsong, as well as the sijo by Rynn Jacobs (so modern they border on "punk sijo" - if there is such a category) and more traditional work by Bill West and Marcyn Del Clements, Watkins gives his new readers a good overview of what is possible in sijo. He well deserves our attention and our subscriptions to his newest magazine which joins the companion zine of Contemporary Ghazals. More, and Briefer Book News Michael Dudley's newest book, Pilgrimage, by Red Moon Press, of minimal haiku has been released. ISBN:1-893959-55-4, $16.95. In The Japan Times, Sunday, September 25, 2005, David Burleigh reviewed Harue Aoki's book A Woman's Life (previously review in Lynx). Burleigh, who is more at home with haiku, was cautious with any praise and stuck to telling his readers about the subject matter of A Woman's Life, which also seemed to baffle him. Anyhow it was good seeing a single-author tanka book getting so many column inches in The Japan Times. Last, the saddest news: In a letter from Yoshio Koganei, we learned that his Mother, Sumiko Koganei, had died in her sleep in the night of December 2nd, 2005. Not only did I share an active correspondence with Sumiko-san, but had reviewed her book, Three Trees.



	Submit your works to Lynx Who We Are Back issues of Lynx: XV:2 June, 2000 XV:3 October, 2000 XVI:1 Feb. 2001 XVI:2 June, 2001 XVI:3 October, 2001 XVII:1 February, 2002 XVII:2 June, 2002 XVII:3 October, 2002 XVIII:1 February, 2003 XVIII:2 June, 2003 XVIII:3, October, 2003 XIX:1 February, 2004 XIX:2 June, 2004 XIX:3 October, 2004 XX-1,February, 2005 XX:2 June, 2005 XX:3 October, 2005	*Next Lynx* is scheduled for June, 2006.** Deadline for submission of your work is May 1, 2006.