Copperfish Books is that small miracle, an independent bookstore in a city with a population not much bigger than my current hometown, and a lot smaller than Lexington, the neighboring Harvard/Tufts/high tech bedroom community where I lived for decades and which lost its three bookstores years ago. Copperfish sponsors literary events, and last week I drove north to Punta Gorda to hear Lola Haskins read from two new books, including how small, confronting morning, a book of poems published last year by Jacar Press. I’m enjoying Haskins’ prose history, Fifteen Florida Cemeteries, but I want to focus on poems Haskins describes as coming “as close to plein air experiences as I could make them.” As someone who often writes about the natural world, I’m drawn to Haskins’ fresh portraits of a palm tree, young ibises, an osprey, indigo fox grapes “all tiny tang and pit,” and, in “Creek Light,” the understanding that “my small boat is no one on this water.”
During her reading, Haskins mentioned the influence of Chinese and Japanese classical poetry on her collection, and poems making up the suite “Lake Alice” share the feel, if not the form, of haiku. Here’s “Carpenter Bee”:
a monk transfixed
by the great bell of dawn
how small confronting morning
are your wings
Lack of punctuation and capitalization reflects “the fact that the natural world doesn’t start or stop,” Haskins writes in her introduction, and the plein air feel of being dropped into the middle of experience is created by “one perception… immediately and directly lead[ing] to a further perception,” Edward Dahlberg’s contribution to the theory of projective verse. One of my favorite examples of Haskins’ palette of techniques is “Walking with My Son.” It’s a poem, like “Creek Light,” that brings human scale to the mystery of creation, and it begins with a series of perceptions:
hundreds of vultures
cross
the humming air
to settle
like black flowers
in certain oaks
Vultures are intimations of mortality, and their disappearance at dusk is a “benediction.” Then comes the speaker’s direct address to her son, nesting him in the midst of the darkness that hides the vultures’ wings: “I wish you had/not already lived//half your life.” Direct and succinct, images presented in words of one and two syllables express both enormous grief and acceptance of nature’s promise: we all die.
Even if we don’t live near an independent bookstore, we can support them by ordering books from them instead of from Amazon. True, shipping isn’t free, and prices aren’t always discounted, but that’s a tax we can be willing to pay. You can order from Cathy at Copperfish Books, 103 W. Marion Ave., Punta Gorda FL 33950, any time.