Publications
Click titles below for details:
• Accidental Pilgrim
• Raymond Oliver His Book of Hours
• Empty Boathouse: Adirondack Haiku
• Shaped Water: A Haiku Year
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Accidental Pilgrim
Tom D'Evelyn
18 panels, 3.75 x 9 inches
Accordion folded, packaged in polypro sleeve. First edition.
Illustrated throughout
ISBN 978-0-9740895-4-6
500 copies printed on glossy stock.
Photos by Toby Hatchett.
Design by Susan Kress Hamilton at Phineas, Portsmouth, N.H.
$18.00, includes shipping and handling
Travel literature often focuses the reader on the universal pattern of human life: going out and returning. Traditionally, this pattern is implicit in many narratives, from those of the culture hero to those of the imperial exile to those of the mystic. Imaginatively engaged, this pattern is intrinsically paradoxical, circles within spirals. It’s said the journey is the goal, the end a new beginning.
Building on Chinese and Japanese literary travel genres, the Japanese haiku master Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) developed a mixed-genre form, creative nonfiction prose and haiku, called haibun. As expressions of his wayfaring life, Bashō’s haibun—for example, the oft-translated Narrow Road to the North—are perhaps his greatest legacy.
Today, along with memoir, haibun is among the emerging literary forms of creative non-fiction. In his haibun sequence Accidental Pilgrim, Tom D'Evelyn, the editor of Single Island Press, writes about a recent trip to Rome. The publication unfolds concertina fashion, and this unfolding, and ultimately circular, book form helps express the paradoxes of travel.
Also available at the Press
$18.00, includes shipping and handling
Send check to:
Single Island Press, 379 State Street, Portsmouth, NH 03801
Also available at RiverRun Bookstore, Portsmouth, N.H.
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Raymond Oliver His Book of Hours
Raymond Oliver
128 pages, 4.25 x 5.5 inches
Wraparound four color soft cover. First edition.
ISBN 978-0-9740895-5-3
500 copies printed by
Phineas, Portsmouth, N.H.
Smyth-sewn bound.
Design by Susan Kress Hamilton.
$20.00, includes shipping and handling
“Ray Oliver's poems are like none others I have read.”
-- Thom Gunn
The art of the short poem requires of the poet intensity of focus and verbal economy. The traditional craft of meter and rhyme, in good hands, makes both possible simultaneously: the craft discovers the semantic information hidden in the syllables of common words while capitalizing on the natural syntactic music of the words as sounds. Bringing these features of language—the backbone of rhythm and the flesh of sound—into right proportion produces virtual incarnation. Indeed, the art of the short poem is an art of memory, personal and collective, that transcends the poet.
The poetry of Raymond Oliver exemplifies the art of the short poem. Composed in a newly invented form Oliver calls triads, Raymond Oliver His Book of Hours explores moments of the past through the craft of the short poem; the result is a book of liturgical and lyrical intensity that overflows the limits of form in recognition of even greater good.
Also available at the Press
$20.00, includes shipping and handling
Send check to:
Single Island Press, 379 State Street, Portsmouth, NH 03801
Also available at RiverRun Bookstore, Portsmouth, N.H.
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Empty Boathouse:
Adirondack Haiku
Madeleine Findlay
Winner -- Second Place --
2009 Mildred Kanterman Memorial Merit Book Award for Excellence in Published Haiku
44 pages, 7 x 6.5 inches
Hardcover with dust jacket
Illustrated throughout
ISBN 0-9740895-3-2
$40.00, includes shipping and handling
500 copies printed on Monadnock Astrolite Silk.
Designed by Susan Kress Hamilton at Phineas in Portsmouth, NH
Sample spread - click to enlarge
Madeleine Findlay’s first book, Shaped Water: A Haiku Year, was greeted with enthusiasm. “This is a carefully crafted book in every dimension, a ‘year’ to set above any other I know in haiku lately. A wonderful debut book for both press and poet” (William J. Higginson). In her new book, a collaboration with designer Susan Hamilton, Findlay draws on a lifetime of experience in the Adirondacks, one of the most celebrated of American landscapes. Every page reminds us that this icon of wilderness is a fragile work of time: through the intersection of haiku and photograph, the book breaks with the tradition of the American sublime to explore a multi-dimensional reality. Each page explores the spaces between words and images, both verbal and visual; the effect is haiku-squared. Empty Boathouse recalls the alchemy of the rivers-and-mountain tradition of ancient China. In the presence of the creatures of this world—the loon calling out from the far end of the lake, a fly crawling up a porch screen, the neighbor’s dog under the table—artists and readers alike assume their modest role as witness to creation.
Empty Boathouse: Adirondack Haiku placed second in the Haiku Society of America 2009 Mildred Kanterman Memorial Merit Book Award for books published in 2008. “Everything about this collection by Madeleine Findlay is carefully crafted: the photographic images of a bygone era blend perfectly with the haiku. ‘Each page explores the spaces between words and images, both verbal and visual: the effect is haiku-squared’ (from the jacket flap). Presented as an extended haiga a new/old aesthetic emerges that honors place and time and memory. Almost all of the photographs were gleaned from her family’s collection. The effect is stunning. This hardcover volume is a unique synthesis in the book arts.” -- Award Announcement
“Madeleine Findlay has an extremely sharp/delicate command of imagery. Everything just happens with the simplicity of the inevitable.” -- Raymond Oliver
“Empty Boathouse is a lovely book on all counts, with evocative haiku, antique photographs, and top-flight production values combining to make an item of great beauty.”
-- Modern Haiku, Summer, 2009
“The eye-fetching front cover photo of an empty boathouse is only the start of a pleasurable experience turning the inside pages with their 15 photos (plus two more on the back cover and flap), almost all of which were taken from the author’s family albums. The 32 haiku (counting one on the back cover flap) complement the photos perfectly: in the dappled shade / the man and rake are one -- / basket of old leaves // filaments of light / through weathered slats / empty boathouse. Overall, a wonderful evocation of a family’s long-ago summer retreat.
-- George Swede (Ontario), Haiku Society of America: Frogpond, January, 2009
Also available at the Press
$40.00, includes shipping and handling
Send check to:
Single Island Press, 379 State Street, Portsmouth, NH 03801
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Shaped Water: A Haiku Year
Madeleine Findlay
72 pages, wraparound four-color cover
Second Edition
ISBN 978-1-4243-3366-0
$20.00, includes shipping and handling
For this “second” edition, 500 copies were printed on Monadnock Astrolite Silk by Phineas in Portsmouth, NH. Smyth-sewn bound. Design and cover photo by Susan Kress Hamilton.
“This is a carefully crafted book in every dimension, a ‘year’ to set above any other I know in haiku lately. A wonderful debut book for both press and poet.”
-- William J. Higginson, haikupub.wordpress.com
• • •
“It takes a sharp eye for the world in miniature, a good ear, and a way with words to put together the deceptively simple phrasings of a good haiku poem. Madeleine Findlay has all three, plus a certain sense for the contemporary scene that sets her poems apart.”
-- John Hanson Mitchell, Editor, Sanctuary Magazine, Massachusetts Audubon Society
• • •
“The haiku from this collection illustrate this idea by capturing moments that, like the shape of water, we often take for granted, both in nature and in the human world.”
-- Ed Zuk, Modern Haiku, Vol. 39, No. 2, Summer 2008.
Also available at the Press
$20.00, includes shipping and handling
Send check to:
Single Island Press, 379 State Street, Portsmouth, NH 03801
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