Terrain Grammar

"Words are not mere objects," Jane Joritz-Nakagawa writes from Japan, where she has lived and worked for many years. In her latest book of poetry, grammar>>, words stir and jar one another. They create landscapes, shifting territorial contexts for each other. With its alternating stanzas and prose passages, fragments and statements, "lime and rhyme," this brilliant hybrid terrain suggests the form of the Japanese haibun. Is it syntax or sheer poetic necessity that most startles the reader with "unfamiliar sensations"? Fierce, discerning, vigilant, these

words have much to say, shout, nudge each other. And touch us with grace.

-- Norma Cole