Bayview Haiku

Fishing in the rain,
nothing biting.
A perfect night to fish.

Under a lily pad,
a silent pike,
the slow ascent of minnows.

Two turtles on a log,
noses touching,
love at first sight.

Gary Busha’s work has been featured on Garrison’s Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. He is the author of Lines on Lake Winnebago, Marsh River Editions, among other works.

People who prize words as much as they do fish may want to bring Gary C. Busha’s new 33-page chapbook along with their tackle box. … These plain-spoken poems blend detailed observations drawn from angling with coming-of-age anecdotes and an occasional barb of philosophy.-Jim Higgins, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Lines on Lake Winnebago offers Gary Busha at his best, the language spare and quietly conversational, carefully chosen to evoke all the senses. These vivid moments in one fisherman’s life become a celebration of experience, from the apprenticeship of youth to the reflectiveness of age.- Nadine S. St. Louis, poet

lines on lake winnebago (cover)These poems taste like wine–they warm going down, can raise a shiver the body is helpless to prevent. I can only read two or three of these poems at a time, before I stop to reflect, remember, while completely under the spell of a primal song. Then, I pick up the story again. What we have here is the flowering of a personal mythology. Joseph Campbell has asked us what myth do we live, and this is Gary Busha’s answer. Stories need a stage–Lake Winnebago. And actors: father, friends, family. Stories need the deep image–a great fish turning below the ice, and its slow descent. Add to this the need for myth to be bigger than our lives or world, stronger than the elements, and elusive as brown pincers hidden under shore rocks.- Michael Koehler, poet

Gary Busha writes about fishing on Lake Winnebago the way some poets write about love. Some days “…the baited nightcrawler / scrapes bottom /only to tempt, / entice.” Some days “Nothing bites.” Some days “To see sunrise / in the web of a perch tail / is a technicolor dream.” Go fishing with Busha. With his words at the end of your line you’ll fall in love with the “lean river boys” and the “old men with big yellow bellies.” His “hooks hold worms– / tantalizing treats that beckon with / a squirming that says come hither– / I’ve got nothing to hide, / come and / get me…”- Mariann Ritzer, poet