The Bricolage of Kotegaeshi is a beautiful poem. Truly remarkable. The tremendous breadth I am accustomed to finding in Howard W. Robertson’s work is here constricted by a narrative shape of such concision and grace that every line bristles with a double motion–the forward-moving pressure of the narrative and a simultaneous bursting outward. Superb!
   • Matthew Stadler
     Clear Cut Press

In terms of syntax, Robertson makes use of streaming periodicity, which holds the listener because of the poet’s steadiness of metaphor. He always has the essential through-line of action unified and on-driving until the last surprising word. His tour de force in The life of birds, trees, and stones is to narrate in the first-person yet to include humanity’s universal experience.
   • Elizabeth R. Curry
     SLAB Magazine

Robertson perfects his unique line, flitting from sublime detail to detail. He reaches a standard that sometimes seems no longer to exist in the current poetry culture of easy praise and low expectations. He is growing into a poet of major consequence.
   • Grant Cogswell
     Author of The Stranger

About the Author:
Howard W. Robertson is a poet and fiction writer living in Eugene, Oregon. He was named 2007 Jack Straw Writer by Jack Straw Productions of Seattle, and is the winner of the 2006 Elizabeth R. Curry Prize and the 2003 Robinson Jeffers Prize for Poetry.

The life of birds, trees, and stones

The sightless trees alive without brain-cells
and awake all night know unconditionally
the slow slide into a silver May morning
when I might be sleeping late as say today
after almost three full hours last evening of
falling down hard at the aikido dojo since I
am an ambitious geezer trying to learn the
compassionate art that can help me resolve
violent interpersonal conflict without losing
spiritually the harmony with the energetic
cosmos that the alders and ash trees outside
my bedroom window practice naturally all
the time as do the juncos and towhees too
whom I see flitting and sitting now among
these dark perennial branches with their
bright new leaves, a perpetual staying and
passing of birds that has been happening
since the feathered reptiles of the Jurassic
period in the Mesozoic era long before the
appearance of the first primates much less
such aging humans as we who have erected
this bird feeder in our backyard and have
brought these large smooth river rocks to
border the pebbled path winding about our
subversively arboreal connecting corridor
through this strip of suburban barrenness
that separates those undeveloped woods
behind us from the unimproved parkland
across the street where our enlightened
Department of Parks and Recreation is
allowing the purple camas to bloom the
same as in the Kalapuyan past, and I am
inspired to step out back in my green felt
bathrobe and touch one of the stones with
my fingers, to squat down under these trees
and impressionably feel the deep dreamless
sleep it has brought from the river's bottom,
to sense the sincere inner strength it offers
freely to whomever receptively discards the
distinction between animate and inanimate
matter and concentrates instead only on the
undifferentiated spiritual energy coursing
continuously through it like lines of force
through a magnetic node, and soon enough
to stand up again with my mind and body
unified in appreciation of the shihonage or
four-directions throw that our metonymic
microcosmic universal yard gracefully but
powerfully performs every night and day
without cease in our peaceful yet martial
struggle for the local soul of suburbia.