by Mike Johnson (Author), Leila Lees (Illustrator)
sketches:
a trick of the eye
outside my window
there's a tūī
sliding
with quick, deft movements
between the pink branches
of the spring plum
with a touch of white blossom at its throat
These are lines caught on the fly. Poems which capture and celebrate the momentary nature of existence. Here we find the natural world, and matters of the heart, caught as they happen in language both natural and precise. They are beautifully complemented by the drawing and sketches of Leila Lees.
'Sketches, a skein of fleeting moments arrested on the page, manages with its glancing, darting reflections and philosophical perceptions, to find just the right formulation to deliver a descriptive vitalism that is open, alert, tentative, ambulatory, elegant, palpable.'