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
doorways
spider
webs
empty
wine
bottle
&
a
builders
level
|
walk
thru
cloud
or
cloud
blow
thru
till
either
ways
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, andfor
methe 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 builders level interacts with the spiders
weband then with the wine bottle (wine, a destabilizer,
being a kind of antithesis to a builders 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, Martones work
remains well worth visiting.
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