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Volume 33.1
Winter Spring
2002

book review

thistle & countless buddha fields
by John Martone

 

reviewed by Bob Grumman

thistle and countless buddha fields. John Martone: Dogwood & Honeysuckle, but from the author: 325 W. Tyler #B, Charleston, IL 61920-1865; each: 2001; 24 pp., 3 x 4 inches, paper, $3, ppd.

Another pair of little chapbooks from the ever-fertile John Martone, both set in (or mainly in) Vietnam (I think), and both containing a few prose notes among such equally jotted-like haiku as:

re
be
ka

at
win
dow

this
tle

on
sill

firefly
  & moon
    at once

what
this ant

carries
off

glints

from thistle and, from countless buddha fields:

back
doorway’s

spider
webs
empty

wine
bottle
&

a
builder’s
level

walk
thru
cloud

or
cloud
blow
thru

till
either

way’s
just
bright

Note, in the first set, the focus on smallness, especially accentuated in the skinny first specimen by its narrowness, its visual echo of the thistle that is part of its subject, and—for me—the tick toward “little” that the broken-off “tle” makes (aided by the set-up that “this” provides, which makes one expect a new word). The last pair of skinny poems are slightly less compressed.

The first is surprisingly packed, narratively: consider how the builder’s level interacts with the spider’s web—and then with the wine bottle (wine, a destabilizer, being a kind of antithesis to a builder’s level, it seems to me)—and then with more than one variety of emptiness . . .

As for the second, we have a deft and delightful re-creation of a moment of fog, but what knocks me out about it is the punning way Martone reveals “only” bright(ness) as “just right.” Before leaving his poems, I should add that countless buddha fields is enhanced by several charmingly appropriate little pencil sketches, one of an “old earthquake cottage,” as Martone describes in his accompanying note. In short, Martone’s work remains well worth visiting.

 

 

©2002 Modern Haiku • PO Box 68 • Lincoln, IL 62656