Twenty-nineteen

This work is rich by its transitions between form - of haiku and sonnet - while riding waves of stories you don't know into ones you do, connecting them all with the drip-drip of days and months?of steady time. Starting with standard haiku, Busséll merges current with past. Using a style he's termed 'storied haiku' he then takes us back to a year when the lunar cycle was closely aligned to 2019, the year 1929, for an original story, and then back further to another such year, 1889,...
More Description

This work is rich by its transitions between form - of haiku and sonnet - while riding waves of stories you don't know into ones you do, connecting them all with the drip-drip of days and months?of steady time. Starting with standard haiku, Busséll merges current with past. Using a style he's termed 'storied haiku' he then takes us back to a year when the lunar cycle was closely aligned to 2019, the year 1929, for an original story, and then back further to another such year, 1889, allowing us to drop in on Van Gogh's moving correspondence. From there we step into an antiphon-like presentation of Shakespeare's sonnets followed by Bussell's haiku translation, which we may begin to find an extension as much as a translation. The book then slips meekly back to the current era, closing with Busséll's original sonnets. What Busséll seems to bring to Twenty-Nineteen is something refreshing, perhaps the one thing none of us have yet been able to recall in the trauma that has unfolded since - it's utter uniformity with all time before and after. You can judge for yourselves whether any hubris is on display here, but if it may be said, "even of the Kingdom of Heaven, that the violent take it by force," then one can be forgiven for bold attempts to possess Beauty.