Each Season we also will be including books that we didn't publish :)
Our first Review goes to:
LABYRINTH OF GREEN – POEMS & PHOTOGRAPHS BY DIANA HAYES
Review by Bill Gough and Caren Moon
One small book may hold the world. Its a compression portal – for, when photos and poetry conjoin, there emerges a swirling & still fusion. In the Plumleaf Press publication of Diana Hayes’: “Labryrinth of Green” the publisher understands how to create magic by combining both her Poems & Photographs – a naturally alchemical way of experiencing the world.
And if we publish books, we need to know when the heft of the book is right, for when the pages are encountered we hear the sound of the wind walking down a descending staircase.
This is what happens when publisher and poet work together.
Labyrinth of Green is a magical book; it walks the walk, swims the swim; follows tiny rivulets of space flowing thru the pages.
This glorious book is small enough to carry to a picnic. Wide-eyed enough to recall our initial wide-shot of the world. Even the tonality is balanced in this creation. It is upon the table waiting to be absorbed.
We’ve now read the book from cover to cover, from back to front and front to back, and allowed our eyes to be guided by tonality and shaded by words’ long-branches. It is a truly great walk, for, each time through, the familiar becomes new, the new becomes familiar.
What it takes to do such a book is to take decades of exploration, and then place the results in a book which may be experienced in an hour, day, week, or years of re-reading. Deceptively short lines take us miles upon a walk; tick-tock a kitchen clock so truthfully that the hands blur to a circular image of Diana’s grandmother, her father, mother, friends, animals, and gatherings of leaning trees. All is united by the central vision of time walked, eons swum, clouds flown thru. Each time a photograph is looked at again, it has a new aspect to be seen.
The writer Caren Moon & I have been observing Diana’s world and actions for decades. And Diana has seen us. She knew how Caren would look in Infrared black & white film upon a rounded rocky beach, and together we’ve all walked Salt Spring, and traded stories and life. Those walks informed years of poems, and books, and scripts, and experiments.
As a Salt Spring Seal, Diana swims the Heraclitan ocean; O, it washes her eyes, & helps her write this complex and simple book. On every page, you may stop and smell the air, while, through poems and photos, you hear the wind singing with the lungs of mother earth.
This is why we go on walks with poets. Especially when she carries a camera. What we see here is a new modality emerging just in time to capture what we have all lived, and to pass it along to an incoming generation. As writers, we are not just one thing – we encompass many talents. This book recognizes and celebrates this truth.
This needs no approach borrowed from Aristotle. Instead we see, being tapped, the spirit of Socrates’ mother. Socrates spoke a central truth of philosophy… “Everything I know, I learned from my mother.”
This is a true book for Mother Earth.
When we enter the Labyrinth of Green, we enter our own lives.
Our thanks to Plumleaf Press for sharing Diana Hayes’ work.
Labyrinth of Green is available in select independent bookstores and can also be ordered directly through: www.plumleafpress.com
ISBN: 978-1-48693270-2. Distributed by Jaguar Book Group Distributors.
Terri Carleton was the main editor for the book and Maggie Goh is the publisher.