{"id":31351,"date":"2023-08-21T13:18:37","date_gmt":"2023-08-21T18:18:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=31351"},"modified":"2023-08-20T19:19:10","modified_gmt":"2023-08-21T00:19:10","slug":"book-report-ozarks-impressions-by-robert-e-gustafson-1995","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/21\/book-report-ozarks-impressions-by-robert-e-gustafson-1995\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Ozarks Impressions<\/i> by Robert E. Gustafson (1995)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"BookI am not sure when I got this book. It has a Redeemed Books sticker on the back that seems to indicate it was added to their inventory in 2010. So somewhere between then and now. It is a collection of poetry written by a retired economist from a consultancy or think tank and it’s illustrated by his brother, a retired artist. The volume I have is numbered 386 of 1500 and is inscribed to Linda. I found myself musing as much on the history of this book and the men who produced it as the actual contents.<\/p>\n

The book contains poems that are built using haikus as the syllable counts for each stanza. The number of haikus per poem, that is, the number of stanzas<\/em> per poem, varies. The book mostly deals with introspection and landscapes and follows the seasons from spring to winter.<\/p>\n

So: okay, the author says they’re haikus, and some of them could stand alone as haikus, but most of them cannot, and they’re just syllable counts for lines in English. I think a much more interesting challenge would have been to make haikus that build upon each other to a common theme or poem, but the poet does not indicate this is the case. Although I am pretty sure the result would have been similar: some good haikus that build to a complete poem, but some haikus that clanged on their own and didn’t rise to independence just serving as filler material in longer poems.<\/p>\n

At any rate, an interesting read, fairly quick, sometimes enjoyable, but sometimes questionable. I remember one poem talking about a fox eating turkeys, and given the relative size and feistiness of each, I had a hard time believing it to be true. I would need a Dablemont ruling<\/a> on that.<\/p>\n

So if you can find one of the other 1,499 copies available, it might be worth a glance if only to think What if I tried that?<\/em><\/p>\n

Also, as an aside, something I learned in Our Oriental Heritage<\/em><\/a>: Apparently, the Japanese were so crazy for hokku<\/em> when they first came out that they had competitions on who could write the best and they bet on it<\/em> until the Japanese government put it down (Our Oriental Heritage<\/em>, 881). I am not sure I would have bet on Gustafson unless I knew something about the other guy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am not sure when I got this book. It has a Redeemed Books sticker on the back that seems to indicate it was added to their inventory in 2010. So somewhere between then and now. It is a collection of poetry written by a retired economist from a consultancy or think tank and it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31352,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31351\/revisions\/31352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}