Half Day Moon Press is very pleased to announce the release of The Sounding Line by Stephen Toft. A digital vignette collection of northern-sea inspired micro-poetry, it twists, turns, tosses up spray, and sparkles just as it darkens.
As a swimmer may be caught by a current and end up further along the beach from where she’s left her towel, the work leaves us in a place other than the one we’ve started from. This is so as one reads the collection from beginning to end, on different readings, or from the first to last words of particular poems.
the old sailor carving songs from the wind
Conversely, a few of the poems set the reader back where she started, albeit in a slightly altered state.
grey sea mist softening gulls
The poems themselves have been constructed with washed up and scavenged fishing lures, conches, pieces of driftwood, shards of sea glass, and tangles of kelp mermaid hair.
dropping anchor
in the bluest part
of the dream
The reader, whether coming to the work as Cummings’ maggie or milly or molly or may, will come away with something altogether other, and yet uncannily akin. Personally speaking, on my last reading, I encountered “a smooth round stone / as small as a world and as large as alone” (Cummings 682).
JSA