A favorite in my collection is White Tulips, ninety-nine haiku by Ronald Baatz. Leonard Seastone of Tideline Press in upstate-New York designed the book, which he handset in Elizabeth and Carolus type and then letterpress printed on dampened, vintage Barcham Green Hayle paper. Single and fold-out pages alternate throughout the book, with the fold-out ones hiding more haiku for the reader to discover. There are 3 cream-colored strips of ribbon in the binding that make the cover even more beautiful.
Baatz writes the sort of haiku I aspire to:
shadows of branches
like dark roads
on winter’s snowy mapnew clock ticks louder
than the old clock ever did
this for ten dollarsclothespins —
like skinny wooden birds
on the line
The Poetry Dispatch blog has written a bunch of posts about Baatz that include both haiku and longer poems. One of the posts quotes Norbet Blei on Baatz: “(he) sees the big picture in small, seemingly simple poems; publishes in obscure, small presses; appears invisible in today’s world of raucous voices. Silence. Every poem is a new awakening to an old truth we seldom find the words to say or see. His work is difficult to locate but worth the search. He lives in Mt. Tremper, NY. There he goes now…”
mountains disappear in fog
and i want to go right along
with them
And White Tulips is available from Joshua Heller.
Hello Susan, Thanks again for posting White Tulips on your blog. Note that the cream colored strips of ribbon are strips of velum. The book is now out of print, but I’m planning some other books and a a broadside with Ronald Baatz. Leonard