Thursday, January 14, 2021

MERRILL GILFILLAN ~

 





from The Warbler Road


                   for Jack Collom


I first heard of the Warbler Road just three years

ago, read of it in a used bookshop in Carolina, and

have thought of it regularly ever since. I was taken

with the term itself: the very idea of a human by-

way, or most anything else for that matter, named

after the wood-warbler group was rousing — no

matter that only a few bird people called it that. I

began to envision the place in the western Virginia

mountains not only as a good area to see birds, but

as a juicy conceptual transect in a most gifted part

of North America, a transect or a partaking, in the

tradition of Fuji viewing or honoring the solstice

at Chaco Canyon. And gradually, inadvertently in

truth, I began daydreaming the Warbler Road as a

sort of Way, a way of ordering one's priorities in life

so as to proceed, at a core aesthetic level, from war-

bler to warbler, something in the nature of Issa and

Basho's "Way of Poetry."




______________________________

The Warbler Road

Merrill Gilfillan

Flood Editions, 2010



Another late night during that Christmas week

fresh with my new bookcase for tiny books, I

pulled out another title I always liked, and by a

writer I've had the pleasure of publishing three

times in the tiniest of fold-out booklets, Merrill Gilfillan.

I've read many books by Merrill and truth be told,

poetry or prose, every darn one is a keeper. Some,

like The Warbler Road from Flood Editions, is

exquisite in its design and printing care.

Imagine holding a book that feels just right

in the hands, just right in the head, and just

right in the heart. You'd want to build

a bookcase for that book.


[ BA ]