Poetry. Poetry on the move, yet always present. "Jonathan Hayes's T(HERE) is a polyphonic, polyvisual, mini-epic consciousness journey. This book is a great read for anyone with a wide-open mind, whether through years of Zen meditation, decades of scholarly philosophical investigation or a few really wild acid trips"--Mel C. Thompson.
NIPPON is, on its attractive surface, the story of a man who goes to Japan from California to marry his beloved. While he is there, the two climb Fuji, wander about, watch a baseball game. And get married.Intricacies abound. The marriage will be between cultures, so the tone and word choice of the poem moves effortlessly between influences as supple and as primal as William Carlos Williams and Mei Sheng. There is another mix: a curious one of restiveness and calm providing a paradox: a yearning for what is there.Hayes draws the characters by what they do or what they choose to see, there is little descriptive prose. Parallelism returns to our poetry, Fuji seamlessly serves as a background and as a metaphor for the stages of courtship, and baseball, loved in both places, casts a benign shadow of Swallows and Giants, like a story children love to hear.The story is rounded with airplanes, those modern equivalents of flaming chariots, and the reader is left with images that are profoundly everyday while smoothly reflecting images that resonate like gongs in an unfamiliar temple.(Description written by Professor Daniel J. Langton.)
American Haiku joins an already impressive body of work by San Francisco poet Jonathan Hayes, following on his most recent Nippon (2012). In American Haiku, we're in San Francisco with the poet, walking the streets, living the city, right with him, always in that haiku moment transfiguring these poems, a deep sense of wabi-sabi.This one's worthy to be on that special shelf with Jack Kerouac's Book of Haikus. As hard as rock in the rain, as soft as long hair in the wind.- Don Skiles author of Miss America
'They found her in the East Village, nailed to the wall of a railroad flat'Dr. Edward Jenner is a New York forensic pathologist: he has attended countless murder scenes and performed thousands of autopsies but the killing of 21 year old Andie Delore is different. The naked body is marked with an indecipherable ancient script and is arranged in the shape of a ritual sacrifice.The murderer poses as a cop. The sole eye witness is Andie's flatmate, Ana da Jong. She can't trust the police anymore. Instead she turns to Jenner for help.But then a second victim is found in rural Pennsylvania. Her head has been placed in a puddle of milk.And then the third. Another decapitation: her naked torso is decorated with exotic bird feathers... Both corpses have the same mysterious script. The killer is leading Jenner and Ana into his own private nightmare. A place from which there will be no escape.
Jonathan Hayes is a poet of the miracle of survival. Whether he is on the job as a poet, husband, ordinary man or a grocery clerk each moment of life brings with it metaphysical adventures. For in these poems you will find redemption and forgiveness in marriage, such as when the poet confesses to his wife, "I shit my boxers," and the expressed singular sorrow for a missing local girl. Poetry is often accused of being too arty and rarified for popular taste. Not so; for in these rough-hewn lyrics you will find raw life, tender love, horror, sorrow, and toil at the day job all set in a unique location on earth: Santa Cruz, California. For here in these poems you will find the beauty of ordinary life in all its vivid majesty. Richard Lopez @ Really Bad Movies.com
