These delicately crafted verses reveal a romantic, gentle, intensely emotional writer who is able to fashion many worlds within the three-line form he has mastered. In his highly personal book, David Latner gives us an insight into his inner life and his reactions to the world of nature, both of which he sees as alternately cruel, ironic, or beautiful. He experiments with several variants of the seventeen-syllable haiku form to develop a distinctive poetic voice. He shows us his delight in the wild life of his pond, the beauty of the woods and flower gardens, the wild expanse of the sea, and the harsh landscapes of the desert. There is a dark side to his verse, born of the sorrow and pain he suffered with the death of his first child in infancy, and later, the deaths, little more than a year apart, of his first wife and his nineteen-year-old daughter. His writing is often colored by despair, by a wrenching sense of irony, and a mordant wit. The contrast with his thoughts on love is striking.
