HCSHR 3:5 — Glenn G. Coats, Furrows of Snow.

HCSHR 3:5 — Glenn G. Coats, Furrows of Snow. Arlington, VA: Turtle Light Press, 2019. ISBN: 978-0-9748147-6-6. 54 pages, 5¼” x 8”; $12.50 US. www.turtlelightpress.com

Reviewed by Maxianne Berger

Furrows of Snow by Glenn G. Coats is the fifth winner of Turtle Light Press’s biennial haiku chapbook competition. As it is a chapbook, it is a slim volume, with only twenty-nine poems. Twenty-nine excellent poems. In “The Back Story,” the poet explains how he decided on which haiku to include. “I laid them all out and read them over and over. I kept reading and rereading, and if it wasn’t right, I took it out.” The contest rules indicate a maximum of forty-eight poems. Coats selected twenty-nine despite technically having room for another nineteen. Would that more poets could grant themselves the judgment and wisdom to choose as carefully – and the self-assurance, when necessary, to let go.

The contest judge, Susan Antolin (editor of Acorn), considers quality, theme, and reader response in her statement. “In these delicately crafted haiku,” she writes, “Glenn Coats brings the reader into a contemplative space where time passes at the unhurried pace of the river he describes.” There are actually two threads in this collection of poems: the river and the poet’s mother. They share the space judiciously, juxtaposed as carefully as are the phrases and fragments within the haiku themselves.

Some poems bring in both topics.

rippled water
I see mother’s cursive
in mine

The rivers of the haiku are places for boating, for walking the dog, for campfires, for fishing.

night sky
I release the minnows
all at once

They are places for community.

a circle of boots
around the deepest hole
river dawn

And they serve, too, as a way into the personal.

river stones
mother slips a step
further away

Coats concludes his “Back Story” by stating, “I wanted to find that balance between river poems and the poems about my mother.” Balance. Yes. And admirably so.

                                                                                               Maxianne Berger
                                                                                               April, 2020

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