Roland Packer — Touchstone Distinguished Books Honorable Mention 2024

Roland Packer is the recipient of a Touchstone Distinguished Books Honorable Mention for 2024 for the volume, no heroic measures (Winchester, VA: Red Moon Press, 2024).

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Commentary from the Panel:

Despite writing haiku for more than forty years, Canadian musician and poet Roland Packer has never before released a full-length collection. Our panel found the 97 poems that comprise no heroic measures worth the wait.

The collection is subtitled “haiku and related poems,” a seeming acknowledgement of the pieces that take typographical liberties in creating meaning:

a bottle
on the interstellar sea . . .
                                              ↑
                                     you are here

to
tem
y
our
s
tor
y
be
come
s
mine
These poems, placed as they are amongst more traditional haiku offerings, come across as emotionally resonant discoveries rather than simple novelties. This is especially true since, as expected from a long-time, widely published haiku poet, the collection exhibits a full range of haiku techniques. Particularly powerful are the monoku:

so soft the snow no heroic measures

 

The meaning of the term “heroic measures” appears to be two-fold: It refers to heroic couplets—rhyming pairs of lines in iambic pentameter commonly used in epic and narrative poetry. It also refers to treatment used to save or extend a person’s life despite the harm such treatment may cause. (The most well-known examples of heroic measures include CPR and amputation.) Throughout the collection, there is indeed a sense not of giving up, but of acceptance, such as the closer:

as they were as they are starry night

 

And the numbingly poignant:

between this world and the next morphine

 

Some of the poems speak to a quiet inner strength:

Goldilocks zone
I
of the storm 

outlasting
everyone she loved—
heartwood

 

The emotional palette of the book is filled out by its author’s passions, which include music and astronomy:

street tune
an elderly couple
step into a waltz

our plans
mapped with care
the canals of Mars

 

We find Packer’s collection to be an innovative, balanced, and meticulously crafted work. While the measures taken may not have been heroic, they were certainly successful.

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See the complete list of winners of both Individual Poem Awards and Distinguished Books Awards in the Touchstone Archives.