| Table of Contents 1999 Winners |  | The Heron's Nest |
Home • Journal • About • Connections Valentine Awards 2000. First Annual Valentine Awards |
| Editor's Choice I admit it. The task of choosing a winner was considerably easier for me than it was for most of you who voted. The principle reason is that I'd already chosen four haiku for Heron's Nest Awards, one for each of the issues in Volume I. Where I did have difficulty was in deciding between those four award-winning poems. Each is powerful in a different way. At last I settled upon the poem that most deftly captures a single ephemeral moment, one that wouldn't be noticed by anyone who arrives at the scene a second before or after the event. In addition to this essential immediacy, I wanted to select a poem that has a clear sense of season. My favorite haiku in Volume I of The Heron's Nest is: the frayed rope Through the moment he describes in words, Burnell Lippy emphatically implies the event that takes place immediately before the rope swings back into the shade: a joyous letting go in the sunshine. And implicit in that letting go is the excited anticipation of plunging into the cool, sensuous wetness of water. Equally implied are the moments immediately following the passage of the rope into shadow: the return from active to passive, from realization to potential, from center stage to anonymity. All of this in one short poem. How? Our attention is directed to a single point of time and space so compact that it illuminates those things going on around it. | |
| – Christopher Herold February, 2000 | |
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