The Measure of Emptiness

Lee Gurga

About the only thing one needs to know about Lee Gurga's street cred where haiku is concerned is that he edits the magazine Modern Haiku, which is, if not the definitive American magazine of haiku, in the top three. So one expects, when picking up a book of Lee Gurga's haiku, that it's going to be top-notch stuff.

It may be a cut below top-notch, but it's still good. The problems I have with the book were more of the format variety than the content variety. It's really easy to go wrong with haiku, but Gurga, as is to be expected, has a good eye for the imagist ninety-five times out of a hundred, and even those times when he slips, he's usually lapsing into humor mode:

night of the eclipse—
as the moon's fringe disappears,
the children misbehave

All well and good. Until you consider the form of the book. When one picks up a 5”x8” (landscape) book of haiku with over eighty pages, even giving them space for table of contents, a quick afterword, and all those other sorts of thing, one assumes there's room in the book for at least three hundred haiku. With that much room on a page, four would be a simple matter. Eight wouldn't be out of the question with a slightly smaller font. So how many haiku does the reader get per page with this book? One. Yep, that's right—the whole book is comprised of seventy-two haiku. Which could have been done in chapbook form for, at most, a quarter of the price. Don't get me wrong, they're seventy-two excellent haiku (well, okay, let's say sixty-eight excellent haiku and five very good haiku), but then you're paying about ten cents a pop, you should probably be expecting more.