Jim Kacian's review of Shaped Water (first edition) in Frogpond Winter 2008

Findlay, Madeleine Shaped Water: A Haiku Year (Single Island Press, 379 State Street, Portsmouth NH 03801, 2007). ISBN 978-1-4243-3366-0. 60 pp., 4.25” x 5.5” perfect softbound, letterpress, stitched in signatures with gloss dustjacket, $14.95 from the publisher, also at >.

If we as haiku poets believe anything at all it is that our small packages are indeed big things. We mouth truisms about giving a poem sufficient space to breath (as though the “breathing” wasn’t taking place in that oxygen-free zone we call mind) so the full drawn-out resonance of each poem will not bump up against the competing resonances in previous or subsequent poems. We know better, and we can be mildly ironic about our particular fetishism. All that being said, we still like it when our work is treated well, couched attractively, respected. Haiku may, as Blyth suggests, aim at significance, but given a chance to commingle with beauty, we’ll take some of that as well. Which brings us to this handsome little book: this is what we’d like for our next volume. Easy to hand, tactile, well-considered and -judged, this is a beautiful production in every regard. Haiku will live and die with its poetic products, but such a volume suggests that good companionship with the book arts certainly heightens the experience. As to the poems: the author is primarily of the “nature observer” school, with a slight tendency at times to draw conclusions or hypothesize. Overall, however, the poems are consonant with the book, beautiful, easy to hand, and attractive. We look forward to more such volumes from this press.