Home Sick From Work

First published in Woodnotes #31, Autumn 1997, page 54.

Home Sick From Work by John Sheirer. First Blade Publishers, 1996, 120 pages, paperback, 5¼ by 8¼ inches. $9.50 postpaid from the author at Asnuntuck Community-Technical College, 170 Elm Street, Enfield, Connecticut 06082 [address no longer correct]. John Sheirer’s Home Sick From Work is an enthusiastic and detailed offering of his poetic achievements. More than 400 individual poems (haiku, senryu, tanka), sequences, and occasional haibun and longer poems populate this new book. I most enjoyed the relationship/erotic section entitled “Slowing the Rhythm.” Perhaps the book could have been more rigorously preened, however. Nevertheless, the book is likeable. Here are two samples from a poet who, in writing haiku, can indeed “now see the little things more clearly”:

home sick from work

every clock

tells a different time

deep winter my exclamation key gathers dust