Brett Brady

A Breath of Fresh Air...A Moment of Repose
by: Marcia Twain, Portland OR

"Brett Brady's "wind in the pages: haiku" lends the reader an oft-overdue moment of repose. Each haiku is a breath -- an unconscious flash that, once considered, illuminates the simultaneous significance and futility of thought -- of the act of thinking. Indeed, each page transports us beyond this plateau, as the visceral experience reminds us of what lies beneath and beyond the self-importance we construe through our memory of names and feelings and words: it is not just "poetry," but a lens through which we can recognize (without cognizing if we are so lucky) -- and perhaps even become -- understanding.

It is a rare book that one can leaf through randomly or sit down and soak in each page in its carefully crafted order. Highly recommended... as evidenced by the following excerpts:

dead leaves…
one by one they go
like butterflies

implicit... succinct... pithy... to-the-point though elegantly indirect... curiously multi-layered, like life,
they invite ambiguity, suggest the narrative and intuit truth... they are haiku!

The character of every experience can be seen in all manner of manifestations. The blue in the sky; the deep of an ocean; the temporary-permanence of a cloud-shape; from the endlessly vast vacuum of outer space and the profoundly still silence of the inner-mind, to the minuscule jittery-twitchings of an ant's antennae, it is, after all, the immediacy of the moment that gives us a deeper sense of life? particularly if we allow room for our own nurturing nature to evolve and grow.

A willingness to embrace this awareness enhances and highlights our innate abilities to perceive, appreciate, and flesh-out our own uniquely distinctive surroundings in remarkable ways, ways in which we might not have otherwise permitted nor even remotely considered.

To penetrate beyond the walls of our insular selves and fully explore the world as it is, invigorated, invites us to collaborate in its artistry..., as we will have learned how to poignantly feel an infinite truth resonating in a single flash of intuitive insight. There is no such thing as a "second time" experience. And this is haiku!

a swirl
of dandelion fluff
flying off"… (mere)