Letters in Time: Sixty Short Poems             

by Michael McClintock

 

Hermitage West, 2005. 80 pp., ISBN 0-9770259-0-X, perfectbound, $10 postage paid from Hermitage West, P. O. Box. 124, South Pasadena, California 91031-0124 or the author at 9230 N. Stoneridge Lane, Fresno, CA 93720.

 

Some poems from Letters in Time: Sixty Short Poems

 

"So acute is McClintock's sensibility that many of his tanka have struck me, not just as poems that I have read, but as signal events in my life." Marianne Bluger, author of Zen Mercies, Small Satoris


Quotes from a review:

as a young poet
I traveled to Innisfree
to draw out the root:
the lake was a small, mean place
and no swans anywhere
 

"Is this persona the real Michael McClintock? Does it matter? Should it, so long as he manages to persuade us to adopt what Coleridge referred to as that 'willing suspension of disbelief''"?

Though I've never been to Innisfree, I have traveled there with William Butler Yeats in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Thus I understand it as a place where a poet can hope "to draw out the root" [McClintock] of English poetry; to "hear the lake water lapping . . . in the deep heart's core." [Yeats] (A place for a citizen of the New World to seek his heritage in the Old. Or turning our attention from the poet to the poetry, a journey back in time to seek the "vertical axis" discussed by Haruo Shirane in Traces of Dreams.

This thin volume is like a hidden treasure that is accessible from four directions: that of the experience of the poet (persona), both subjective and objective, imaginary and realistic; that of literary allusion . . . that of the search for the vertical axis, not only of the poems herein, but by extension, of the tanka, haiku, and senryu of Western and other non-Japanese cultures; and the personal relationship the reader develops with the text as he or she progresses through its pages"

--From a review by Johnye Strickland, Simply Haiku, Winter 2005, vol 3 no 4

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