What a pleasure to open Elizabeth Gauffreau’s new book, Simple Pleasures: Haiku from the Place Just Right. Every page features a beautiful nature photo with an accompanying haiku. Combining poem with image creates a new art genre, one where each component gives more meaning to the other.
The first page displays a peaceful dirt road surrounded by evergreens. The poet invites the reader to accompany her on this trip through the natural beauty of the northeastern United States:
dirt road adventure washboard, slapping branches, ruts GPS turned off
I love that the GPS is turned off so that instead of following technology, we—poet and reader—are opening ourselves to the adventure.
Gauffreau directs us to majestic vistas, but she also points out the small or almost unnoticeable, such as a dappled woods image where you must look carefully or be directed by the poem:
new-growth pines, maples farmer’s forgotten stone wall a forest reclaimed
I learned things from the poems, which should not be surprising as Gauffreau seems so at home in the region.
stand of white birches roots entwined canopy shared indigenous trees
I hadn’t thought of birches as being Indigenous, so that was a bit of defamiliarizing the familiar, I suppose, as it made me take note. And it reminded me of the Robert Frost (another New England poet) poem, “Birches.”
The book is organized by the seasons of the year and makes a full cycle of the beauty of the area. Simple Pleasures: Haiku from the Place Just Right makes a gorgeous addition to my collection of Elizabeth Gauffreau books, Telling Sonny and Grief Songs. Heads up, though, I would recommend purchasing the paperback version because you will want to flip open the book often.
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Author Biography
Elizabeth Gauffreau writes fiction and poetry with a strong connection to family and place. Her work has been widely published in literary magazines, as well as several themed anthologies. Her short story “Henrietta’s Saving Grace” was awarded the 2022 Ben Nyberg prize for fiction by Choeofpleirn Press.
She has published a novel, Telling Sonny, and a collection of photopoetry, Grief Songs: Poems of Love & Remembrance. She is currently working on a novel, The Weight of Snow and Regret, based on the closing of the last poor farm in Vermont in 1968.
Liz’s professional background is in nontraditional higher education, including academic advising, classroom and online teaching, curriculum development, and program administration. She received the Granite State College Distinguished Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2018. Liz lives in Nottingham, New Hampshire with her husband. Find her online at https://lizgauffreau.com.
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