Hyatt and Salzer’s first linked-verse collaboration together offers poetry of movement between the authors’ verses, choreographed by the Japanese forms of renga, rengay, and others. The collection achieves a “blissful silence of ecstatic dance” in poems that aren’t about merely friendship but are themselves friendship made poetic. In most of the pieces, apart from the solo linked-verse, the poets alternate stanzas, which creates the effect of “roots and shoots.../ push-pull energy/ in a garden/” to cultivate a natural tension but also a stirring awareness of the space between verses, friends, moments, and nature and art.
 

The subject matter reflects the collection’s poetic form, often juxtaposing, as is traditional in Japanese poetry, seemingly disparate images to illuminate stark truths that relate at times to the political, as in “The Machine” and “A Drop of Water,” the ancestral, as in “Inheritance” and “Grandma’s Stories,” and the natural, as in “Kaleidoscope” and “First Light,” where lines like “tired of the English language / I sit in the shade/ with a cranefly” explore the kind of paradoxes that aren’t housed in the sphere of chaos but rather the sphere of dream. The world is always turning, yet life remains still. Echoes shows readers contradictions of peace.

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Yet while Hyatt and Salzer’s poems occupy this lulling, liminal space of blurred consciousness, they also harmonize into a soundtrack or sound-portrait of modern life, and the collection is abundant with lines like this one from “Black Ice”: “breaking news/ in the old t.v./ drifting clouds.” The way we live today is exposed in blends of dissimilar images that pair the mundane with the strange, but the authors throughout point towards how we can find serenity amid this chaos. An echo is a thing between sound and silence, and readers in this collection will find depth and meaning in their exposure to all three.

 

Takeaway: A linked-verse collaboration exploring nature, friendship, and the spaces between.

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Great for fans of: Hiroaki Sato’s One Hundred Frogs, Matsuo Bashō.

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Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

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Print Date: 02/06/2023