August Rituals

In his foreword to the book, Tim Tomlinson writes:

“In these pages of lyrics, haibun, prose poems, and free verse, the same superabundance of stimulating detail — fragrance, colour, meteorological event — occurs and unfolds as naturally as flowers lean toward light. In its pages, the landscape is lyric and alive, familiar yet strange — “jacaranda trees give off a cellophane effect”, and trousers overturned on a wooden chair “are theatre to the imagination”. Where there is fear, it’s “the affectionate fear of pink begonia flowers”. The sky “peels like an orange” and the sun hangs on an umbilical cord, as though worlds are contained in other worlds from which other beings peer, and one feels as if one has entered a vibrant colour-soaked surface of a pichwai painting…

The great Canadian songwriter/poet Leonard Cohen once dismissed “Suzanne”, the song that made him famous, as “mere journalism”. Journalism, perhaps: there was an actual Suzanne, who lived near a river, who served Chinese tea and oranges, and who wore vintage clothes. But certainly not mere, for without them, the song would not have soared into the vast megacosm. August Rituals is similarly anchored, and therefore similarly aloft. You’ll want to travel with it.