A World of Small Things Singing by Joan Higuchi

Wherever your reading takes you in Joan Higuchi’s “A World of Small Things Singing” you are continually surprised by delightful chords of precisely correct language about what is described—“dragonflies flirt with their images/within the brook.” You encounter inspiring ideas about relationships of nature’s beings with earth–“scaffolding of trees. With roots like bones/ holds the earth together.” You experience paradises of language like the poet’s alluding to her feeling for spring—”A liturgy of movement/ this earth, pregnant with sunshine/announces regeneration/ with birdsong floating like chiffon. “A World of Small Things Singing” is a wondrous collection of nature poetry, which, to use a line from the author, is “a comforter of words.”

–Maxwell Corydon Wheat, Jr., First Poet Laureate, Nassau County, New York

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

This accomplished poet permits us to enter the intimacy of her memory and through her eloquence, connects us with the universal. Her poems are rooted in microscopic observation, the soul’s eye focused on nuance, on veneration, on truths that we might have known and since forgotten. She makes it possible for us to remember, to experience once again the beauty of small things, intimate moments. These poems are rich, filled with cadence, and show meticulous care in how they are composed. You must add this book to your library; it is a marvelous book.
–Gladys Henderson, Walt Whitman Birthplace, Poet of the year 2010

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

Across the seasonal spectrum of Long Island’s seas and woodlands, Joan Higuchi‘s capacious lyricism dilates “small things” with her resonant, reverent awe. The natural world inhabits her sensibility as if at an altar, redolent of the transcendentalists Thoreau and Emerson, and her poetry soars into liturgical “trilling … wild song.”

–Gayl Teller, Nassau County Poet Laureate, 2009-11

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]