Glenn Coats’ Furrows of Snow, like other books I’ve ordered from Turtle Light Press, is very well produced and a joy to hold and to read and reread. I also appreciate the great care that Rick Black, TLP’s publisher, took to produce Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku (2012), one of my favorite books of haiku by one of my favorite haiku poets. Another fine TLP haiku collection is Chad Lee Robinson’s The Deep End of the Sky (2015), a book that perhaps unintentionally echoes Robert Sund’s Bunch Grass (1969) and intentionally draws deeply from the mysteries of life on America’s seemingly endless prairies.
Glenn Coats’ well-ordered poems in Furrows of Snow focus on two of his two great loves—his mother and rivers—as he explains in “The Back Story,” a short essay near the end of his book. Rivers and his mother are to Glenn what oceans (and rivers) and his Quaker mother were to Walt Whitman—the source and end of life. Glenn’s haiku in Furrows of Snow strike directly home to the heart as much as his fine books of haibun do. After reading this haiku collection, be sure to read his four haibun collections: Snow on the Lake (2013), Beyond the Muted Trees (2014), waking and dream (2017), and most recently Degrees of Acquaintance (2019). What I most admire in all of Glenn’s writings is that he focuses not on himself and his individual joys and aches, but on relationships with others, both the good and the bad, especially family relationships. His treatment of these latter subjects can include us, too, if we’re perceptive and receptive to the reading. Slowly reading and rereading Furrows of Snow may help us remember our experiences on and by rivers and our times near and with our mothers whether they be present or gone.
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