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William Soutar,
Flowers of Life: A Selection of Cinquains, edited by
Brian Strand. Q.Q.Press, York House, 15 Argyle Terrace,
Rothesay, Isle of Butte, PA20 0BD, Scotland, U.K., ISBN
1-9032030-473, card covers, 32 pp., £5.00.
Title Page:
To those who know Soutar from his
scarce published poems and Joy Hendry’s Gang Doun wi a Sang
(diehard drama), this simple and sensibly produced 32 page
booklet is a real surprise. Soutar wrote cinquains! In pure,
beautiful English too! (He has been typecast as a somewhat
whimsical Scots poet). I’m still rather a beginner in haiku
related forms, but these look to me like really good cinquains,
each one titled, readable, sometimes proverblike or prayerlike,
often religious. Many contain similes; the ‘as’ word is
frequent. There are about 125 cinquains here, carefully
selected, and published with permission from the National
Library of Scotland, who are the owners of the copyright. . .
.Brian Strand has done a wonderful job. He lives in
Buckinghamshire, which one would not think a convenient place
from which to conduct this work. Brian has come to Soutar from
the Cinquain and religious background and has been in contact
with the Cinquain Journal and other American sources of this
short form.
Highly
recommended.
“The reader, however, should have no trepidation about the
pleasant and entertaining short poems in this book, which are
written, have no fear, in English all the way. The poems in the
main text of the pamphlet are well chosen if printed closely
packed, usually five cinquains to a page.
Christopher T. George
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