“Stephen Sandy has inserted a helpful note on a handsome gray insert in his new book Netsuke Days that informs his reader of the meaning of netsuke, as well as his intent to display his menagerie of 'verbal carvings' that resonate throughout his book as short, eidetic lyrics.

Netsuke: toggles, usually ivory, bone or wood; worn by men to secure items to sashes tied over kimono, which lack pockets. Carved animals, people, fruits, vegetables, mythological creatures, genre scenes, subjects alluding to myths or folk tales. Many of these poems describe netsuke or evoke them; others do not.'

After reading only the first few of these titleless poems, one recognizes immediately the influence that the haiku masters--Basho, Buson and Issa--have had on Sandy's sensibility, an influence he has carried with him since his Fulbright at the University of Tokyo in the mid sixties. As poetic 'toggles,' these fresh observations and commentaries on things both external and internal do indeed meet Ezra Pound's criteria for the image as 'an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.' Writing what one might call American haiku, Sandy works around the traditional haiku's strict three line form in lyrics that are both longer and shorter than 17 syllables, but no less resonant as accounts of seized moments in distilled expression. Here are a few random selections that reveal Sandy's masterful melding of West with East in his signature droll style.

Day brings script of rainless cirrus.
Cloud confounds the gardener's plot.

Dawn,
Samaritan!

Pigeons outside the
Lyric window scrambling for
Lyric breadcrumbs left
by the Greek waiter. Inside
these police cadets
wolf chollah and eggs-over.
All, gunmetal blue, slate gray.

Icarus: his two white legs
sticking out of the
sea, making a victory sign.

O my fingers, we
can forgive and forget
but can we remember?

Wormwood forest, old Chernobyl:
it should have been impossible
not to love all things in a world so filled.
O, the half life within us and abroad!

"As one can see from this sampling, these lyrics resist cohering in any narrative way from poem to poem. The body of days that lies beneath the book's unbuttoned garment is revealed from page to page as an array of parts that do not comprise a whole, but nonetheless do effectively evoke what the poet Theodore Roethke called the lyric's essential 'broken music.' These 'netsukes' stand on their own as exquisite lyrical 'carvings' rather than concatenate as a cognitive chain of connected thoughts. And although many of them are difficult to grasp at first, they resound in time almost as koans if one is patient enough to stick with them. Although classical in their Japanese influence, they are inoculated from obsolescence by their continual subversion of meaning and cultural assurances. One could argue then that these poems are just as postmodern as they are ancient.

Both whimsical and grave, Netsuke Days catches Sandy thinking, observing, dismissing, critiquing, joking in epigrammatic slices that reflect 'emotional and intellectual complexes' in exquisitely sculpted 'instances of time.' These poems shimmer on the surface, but only because they have risen from the deep. Or as Sandy himself so aptly puts it: 'This work is not a moment's trade/but various as every mood/a man has made.'"

“Stephen Sandy strikes his own sturdy balance between the world lovingly observed and the language lovingly apprehended. Among many splendid poems here, see 'Shutters' as a powerful example. It hovers tautly between calm and something close to violence, between speaking and keeping silent, peacefully holding at bay the likely explosion. Elsewhere, with equal aplomb, Mr. Sandy cracks strings of words like whips, as when he rhymes 'loiter' and 'reconnoiter.' This is a wonderful book.”