Bridges: To There by Gary W. Burns

Gary Burns’ Bridges: To There is an evocative collection of poetry, but lacks the visceral immediacy of his earlier collections of meditative poetry, such as Clouds: On the Wind.

Within the first of the four sections, the poems contain the same mixture of Haiku-esque observation, yet contain a childlike rhyme scheme. For example, in “The Wind All About”:

In the trees, with ease
The bird flees the stir of leaves
When the spirit of the wind
Stirs us
Go we must

The effect this has is to draw the reader away from the actual words and images and focuses us on the sounds themselves – there is no conjuring of the wind here, but an emphasis on sibilance, where we lose the gentle flowing of wind in the leaves and the gusts beneath the bird’s wings. Instead, rhyming is a consistent theme and device throughout the collection, including a poem titled “A Rhythm A Rhyme,” which lacks the emotion in Burns’ other work, and reads more as an exercise in rhyming.

There are many moments of clarity and beauty, which indeed do inspire a similar reverence for the natural world as his previous collections, but some of the imagery loses its power, and indeed some of its poetry, with this mixture of rhyme and Haiku. That said, there is more childlike fun in this use of rhyme and alliteration, so it certainly does have its appeal, but one wonders if Burns did stick to the Haiku’s 5-7-5 structure, the collection would be stronger overall.