Dr. Perlmutter taps into the two relatively distinct poetic mindsets in two books. The first he calls "Western" as seen in his poems in Book I: Visions of Ithaka. The second is "Eastern" as found in the poems in Book II: Not Quite Haiku. Together, the reader is invited to search for the poetic tapestry underlying what he considers to be the newly emergent First Global Civilization.
For example, in Visions of Ithaka, he makes his Western voyage to the distant Island of Ithaka, a global trip by way of Serajevo "Dangerous Legacies", and Russia "Lupatin's Potatos" and China, "Beijing Bus." He seeks the "Universals" and the particular in "Little Sparrow". And the high road in "I am Beginning to Surf in Cyberspace" to "Coming Home".
He touches on a wide range of emotions he experiences along the way, from "Loving" to "Remembering", from "Rage" to "Regrets" and "I Don't Want to Say Goodbye". From the immediate "I'm Missing the Miraculous" to the transient "Nothing Lasts Forever". He writes in the sensory in "O the Perfumes Passing" and "A etish for Fruit stands" and the spiritual, "The bloody borders between the secular and the spiritual" and "Tears have no religion". Finally, his concern for nature is expressed in "Let us Celebrate Biodiversity" and "They are burning the library in Amazonia".
In Book II Not Quite Haiku, Dr. Perlmutter is less concerned with the inner self, and ego and more with the Japanese style of aesthetic appreciation of the compact, evocative, the direct aesthetic, and intuitive appreciation of nature and events. In the unique mindset of the Japanese poetic experience, he sees "bonfires of orange candles", "the soft sleep of butterflies and finches" and "crumpled brown leaves cracking"
He also experiences a variety of rather unique images such as "prayers reaching through the clouds" and "green grass of home saying welcome back" or "trains condemned to their long tracks", Dr. Perlmutter recognizes he does not follow the rigorous rules of Haiku, thus the title of the collection "Not quite Haiku". But his concenption of Haiku gives him sufficient guidance to find a non-Western way of seeing.
It is, on reflection, when we embrace the two sets of poems, that we find they are only different in some respects but basically they are complimentary. They are a stage in the quest to see through poetic eyes the deeper meanings awaiting us in the First Global Civilization. They are in reality two sides of the same coin in some respects, despite different aesthetic paths. And they await orchestration during a small but not insignificant step towards the evolutionary set of discoveries that await us in finding a future Humanity without Boundaries in the First Global Civilization.
