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 ]
