Three Line Worlds
Poems in Haiku Style
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
GLEANINGS FROM "THREE LINE WORLDS"
Lost in a forest of words
The poet pleads for
The eyes of a child
Pink geraniums...
So eager to please
They pucker their lips to me
Pick up the lily
Battered by the storm
Comfort the garden’s sick child
Deep in the spring marsh
A lost gosling quivers as
She meets the still fox
A cloud-smudged moon
The face of a fat gamin
Stained with blueberries
Miracle of the fall trees
Orange waterfalls
Saffron tapestries
Cold, silent fall trees...
The bowed shoulders of brown monks
Standing penitent
Sand serpents in bikinis
Would one offered me
An apple of youth
Here come leaping foam horses
Hurdling their own waves
In the race to shore
Asleep on the beach
The bald man’s scalp sweats...
In his dreams, does he have hair?
To present your lady love
With a fresh-picked rose
Slit its slender throat
Above my love’s lips
An elfin seamstress stitches
New lines to caress
I was young and anxious once
Am old and smug now
With young, anxious sons
How could the sun shine
Birds sing, forsythia bloom
The day my son died?
I am a tourist
My province is me
I am endless as the skies
I could not cope with this world
Now comes the next one
What if it’s the same?
God’s hand is the desert wind
Sculptor of Adam
Sealer of Eden
Peter Pan soars, swoops
Mocks me strapped in my plane seat
"You call that flying?"
Many cities
Are named Buffalo
Which one mourns their massacre?
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Book Details
About the Book
These delicately crafted verses reveal a romantic, gentle, intensely emotional writer who is able to fashion many worlds within the three-line form he has mastered. In his highly personal book, David Latner gives us an insight into his inner life and his reactions to the world of nature, both of which he sees as alternately cruel, ironic, or beautiful. He experiments with several variants of the seventeen-syllable haiku form to develop a distinctive poetic voice. He shows us his delight in the wild life of his pond, the beauty of the woods and flower gardens, the wild expanse of the sea, and the harsh landscapes of the desert. There is a dark side to his verse, born of the sorrow and pain he suffered with the death of his first child in infancy, and later, the deaths, little more than a year apart, of his first wife and his nineteen-year-old daughter. His writing is often colored by despair, by a wrenching sense of irony, and a mordant wit. The contrast with his thoughts on love is striking.
About the Author
At an age when most men retire even from playing golf and tennis, David Latner embarked upon the writing life he had felt constrained to give up years before, when the demands of family life and a deep grief all but overwhelmed him. He spent many years in the business world, but resumed playwriting, his first love, after he retired. He had several workshop productions of his plays, and then turned to an intensely personal form of poetry. He has always been a New York City person, born there and living the first half of his adult life in Manhattan. Rarely had he held a manner or screwdriver in his hand. Yet, over the years he lived in "a little house in the big woods" in Becket, Massachusetts, he became adept at many country dweller skills: "woodin" with a chain saw, house painting, and mowing. The birds, flowers, and trees, and the change of seasons were an inspiration to him, as were his travels to the sea and the desert. His verse reveals his deeply felt insight into life and love.