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Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

One-Strike Poems
Malcolm Ritchie’s Mountain on Top of a Mountain

September 4, 2025 by Jan Herman Leave a Comment

Click to purchase.

Here is a magnificent book of short poems so rich in images, so clear and yet mysterious, so generous in feeling that, to steal a thought from a Donald Hall essay about Dylan Thomas, “form and shape and honey-in-the-mouth make small monuments of English literature.”

Malcolm Ritchie, a former Zen monk, writes in an introduction that his “short-form poems” are often mistakenly described as haiku. He points out that haiku are related to “a very different cultural and historical mind-set,” while these poems are derived from an interest in “the chants and prayers of indigenous peoples” and, yes, “graffiti on the walls of the various cities” he’s lived in or visited. Here are a few examples.

these poems are the evaporations
of myself
condensing


unseen within a shrouding cloud
snow discretely visits the mountain


I'm tangled in you
like the hare in the moon

up in the hills at this age now
even my stick takes a rest

And then there are Ritchie’s quick-sketch drawings, which illustrate the topical sections breaks of the collection such as “Birds,” “Trees and Plants,” “Beasts,” “Bugs,” “Human Condition,” “Love/Sex,” and “Time.” Here is one:

HUMAN CONDITION

“Human Condition” © by Malcolm Ritchie (Click to enlarge.)

Filed Under: Art, Literature, main, News, political culture

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Jan Herman

When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind.
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Several books of poems have been published in recent years by Moloko Print, Statdlichter Presse, Phantom Outlaw Editions, and Cold Turkey … [Read More...]

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