Sea Wind: Haiku

“Rilke advises the aspiring poet to ‘love the questions.’ And what is a sea wind but a river of questions blowing out of the unknown? Jacob D. Salzer’s Sea Wind begins by showing us how the mother of all questions—who am I?—resounds in the bottomless well of a barred owl’s eye. That deep resonance continues throughout these enigmatic, dreamlike haiku, each raising more questions than answers. Hidden roots and talking trees, one-sided stories and a twisted plot, a prisoner’s letter and the afterlife of ants. An error message and a lost key. Juxtaposed with equally evocative images from the natural world—wolf and raven, moss and stone, snow and crow and fire—these poems carry not only the scent of pine and the taste of blackberry, but also a sense of the deepest mysteries that entwine our brief human lives with the life of the Earth. Nearly one-third of the haiku refer to an unnamed ‘she’—her secrets, her silence, her whispers, her shadow. Is she a woman? Many women? Or is she the Earth? There may be no single answer to this or to any of the imponderable questions adrift on this Sea Wind. The reader is invited to wander, wonder, and ponder: before the thought / of you and I / the endless sea.” ~ Jenny Ward Angyal, author of The Wind Harp, Earthbound, and co-author of Walking Widdershins: An Ode to Joy