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"Spare, raw, exquisite, these elegiac haiku speak for all of us who have lost our beloved animals. -Eileen Sypher The theme of an elegy. The form of a haiku. But elegies are usually not for cats, and haiku mostly have a set number of syllables. Yet the pain of parting with your cat or your dog is both deep and unique. It is a grief most of us keep to ourselves. It is magnified because we live inside with them, and with our birds and turtles, sometimes fish and snakes. Up here in Maine, in the old days, the animal barn and the household were connected against the winter. In even older days, many of the necessary animals lived right in our dwellings as well, their warmth important for us. From gerbils to horses, we physically love and spiritually bond with animals that are not us. We rarely speak of this when they die. We don't know what to say. They were mainly silent with us and now we are silent without them. So, raw haiku, renegade haiku, all with the tone of elegy, might be a new form of language for an ancient grief. Try them yourself. When my wife and I drove home from the veterinary clinic after Sonnets had stretched out her front paws and died, I was numb and silent. Some months later these awkward but apt little phrases came to me. Over some weeks there were more and more. It was like playing with Sonnets again. I decided to call them Raw Haiku. ""Duncan,"" writes the English professor, Dr. Sypher and the ordained minister, Rev. Eileen, ""is a poet, preacher, psychotherapist, who probes with rare words of love, what few of us are able to: the raw edges of this awful grief. He makes Sonnets famous 'for sad people everywhere.' These poems open worlds."""

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"One man's love and grief for his cat will leave tracks across your heart. -Elizabeth Garber, Belfast Poet Laureate 2006. Each one finely sculpted from the shards of grieving memory, these haiku speak intimately to that deepest ache that anyone who dearly loves and loses an animal knows. How right it is that both this aching heart and this dearest companion, here, in the urn of art, find a place of rest together. -Eileen Sypher, Associate Professor Emerita, English Though 14-line sonnets dog many a high school English student, Duncan Newcomer's haikus about Sonnets-his late Abyssinian cat-welcome all who have ever been granted the joy of sharing a home with a feline. If T.S. Eliot captured the joys and personalities of cats in our midst, then Newcomer has captured the enduring relationship that we have with our animals when, always too soon, they are gone. ""I had all the language,"" he writes. ""You had not a word./You are how we are together now."" No analysis necessary. No lines to be scanned. Just a poet, allowing us to be, as is he and Sonnets. -Martin Davis is a writer in Fredericksburg, Virginia"

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