Book review: Breath Marks, by Gary Hotham

Breath Marks is a full-length collection of haiku from veteran poet Gary Hotham.  The book is tiny, small enough to fit in your pocket, and contains 81 haiku (82 including the title poem, printed on the back cover).

Hotham's introduction is titled "Why Poetry?" and focuses on the importance of words and poetry.  He illustrates an important facet of poetry (and more specifically, haiku) when he says, "...it's how the words are combined that's most important for the power and deep effect of the poem upon the reader."

It's obvious from Hotham's haiku that he takes great care in crafting his poems with regard to word choice and placement.  For example:

   outside the door

   daylight

   waits

This poem could have been worded many different ways, but Hotham chose those specific words and conveyed the haiku moment with a brevity that many experienced poets lack.  Hotham's control of language and format should not be surprising -- as well as a respected haiku poet, he is also assistant editor for the haiku journal Wisteria.

Breath Marks is nicely printed, with the haiku each given their own page.  There is even a table of contents, listing the poems by first line.  There are no sections or breaks -- just a hundred or so pages of good haiku.

   fog.

   sitting here

   without the mountains

The book ends with another short essay by the author, titled "Why Haiku?"  In these couple pages, Hotham discusses haiku in general, including the constricting form used by many beginners of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables each.  Hotham says that "in most cases three lines does it" for him -- indeed, almost all of the poems in this book are three lines, though there are a handful of one-, two-, and four-line haiku.

   my wife still asleep--

   snow piles up

   on the steps

Breath Marks was published by Canon Press in 1999, and it won first place in the Haiku Society of America's Merit Book Awards in 2000.  The book is available online from AbeBooks, Amazon, ThriftBooks, or directly from Canon Press (used to be $4; now $8).  Also on the publisher's website is a sampling of some of the poems from the collection.

For more information and analysis about Hotham and his haiku, read Vicki Ballentine's in-depth essay from 2004.  The article briefly discusses Breath Marks, and it also compares some of Hotham's haiku to those of other poets.

   soft rain

   a bubble

   on the water

   goes out

(Originally posted on Helium.com, June 2009)

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