Word: haiku
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...Like haiku or hieroglyphics, diplomatic language often requires interpretation. But the new Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, has taken the semiotics of diplomacy to a new level. She literally wears her feelings on her lapel, but she makes her point subtly, with brooches. "Everyone will just have to read my pins," she says. Below, a selection from the Albright collection, with accompanying interpretation...
...Ants on the Melon (Random House). Virginia Hamilton Adair's first book of poetry is one of the year's imaginative peaks. The 87 poems by this 83-year-old poet are short--the longest runs to 52 lines--and as richly terse as haiku. But the many themes addressed in this collection--life and love and loss--are clear and capacious, a distillation of life into a perfect ordering of words...
Hopes for similar surges, along with jobs and rising income, drew throngs of townspeople and the high school band in Buffalo two weeks ago to groundbreaking ceremonies for Toyota's West Virginia engine plant. Local schoolchildren sang a haiku ("Cherry Blossoms born of spring, let's go see, let's go see") as dignitaries planted 10 Japanese maples to symbolize Toyota's new U.S. roots. For Senator Jay Rockefeller, landing Toyota marked the capstone of a 20-year crusade to boost the economy of one of the country's poorest states. Thanks to Toyota, Rockefeller says, Buffalo...
...home. Out of a camera bag fished from the waste came a list in pencil, in what seemed to be a young girl's handwriting. Amy: light pink, size 8. Corry: dress. Steph: orange or hunter green--the plan for a spree in Paris, transformed into a haiku of loss. And somewhere lost in the waters too is an unuttered promise, a diamond ring to accompany a proposal to a lover who must now long for the rest of her life. The miasma off the beaches of New York was the cruelest of elements, mixing the memory and desires...
...judge by Ants on the Melon, Adair is a natural miniaturist. The longest verse in the collection is 52 lines, the shortest a mere seven. The poemlets are as richly terse as haiku, while themes in the longer ones reverberate like novels in cameo. Her images are tellingly precise, surprising. In "Mojave Evening," coyotes gather "And not far enough to mean fear/ only decorum/ the periscope ears of three/ no five rabbits. Waiting...