Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku (Wesleyan Poetry) - Tapa dura

"As a volume of nature poems, Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku is a joyous, flamboyant, and radiant collection that sharpens our ability to perceive and appreciate discrete manifestations of the natural world. Through the vehicle of these wondrous and succinct poems, Vizenor reinforces the reality of our human dependency upon the natural world as the source that sustains us within the cycle of life. He reminds us that we are born to perceive the beauty of our surroundings and, by doing so, celebrate life in all its majesty."--Sonja James, The Journal "With patience, Favor of Crows opens a deeper understanding of Vizenor's poetics ... The book benefits from reading little by little, so you can be drawn into the poems' precise focus and encounter a speaker who seems to see the world in haiku moments." --Janna Knittel, Rain Taxi "The ability to bring out so much in so little is truly amazing and what makes this so enjoyable. These are short stanzas to be cherished and not rushed." --Kevin Winter, Portland Book Review "Vizenor's word, survivance, also is there in the opening of the introduction. It is the survivance of the native mindset after all that survive. Vizenor explains that he sees the virtual world in haiku. Almost as if they were film. Or images on a scrim ... Vizenor's new collection still finds him in his waders in the steady stream of the evocative."--Diane Glancy, Transmotion

Favor of Crows is a collection of new and previously published original haiku poems over the past forty years. Gerald Vizenor has earned a wide and devoted audience for his poetry. In the introductory essay the author compares the imagistic poise of haiku with the early dream songs of the Anishinaabe, or Chippewa. Vizenor concentrates on these two artistic traditions, and by intuition he creates a union of vision, perception, and natural motion in concise poems; he creates a sense of presence and at the same time a naturalistic trace of impermanence. The haiku scenes in Favor of Crows are presented in chapters of the four seasons, the natural metaphors of human experience in the tradition of haiku in Japan. Vizenor honors the traditional practice and clever tease of haiku, and conveys his appreciation of Matsuo Basho and Yosa Buson in these two haiku scenes,"calm in the storm / master basho soaks his feet /water striders," and "cold rain / field mice rattle the dishes / buson's koto." Vizenor is inspired by the sway of concise poetic images, natural motion, and by the transient nature of the seasons in native dream songs and haiku."The heart of haiku is a tease of nature, a concise, intuitive, and an original moment of perception," he declares in the introduction to Favor of Crows. "Haiku is visionary, a timely meditation and an ironic manner of creation. That sense of natural motion in a haiku scene is a wonder, the catch of impermanence in the seasons." Check for the online reader's companion at favorofcrows.site.wesleyan.edu.