Review of Ed Baker/Cid Corman "Restoration Letters" and Ed Baker "Restoration Poems"
“Building Words in Time”: A Review of Ed Baker/Cid Corman’s “Restoration Letters (1972–1978)” (tel-let, Charleston, IL, 2003) and Ed Baker’s “Restoration Poems (1972-2007)" (Country Valley Press, 2008, countryvalley@mac.com) In the age of e-mail, at a time when the Post Office is deep in the red and thinking of scaling back delivery to five days a week, it was a welcome pleasure to receive “Restoration Letters” as a companion to “Restoration Poems” from poet and artist Ed Baker. Ed’s minimalist, stream-of-consciousness poetry had caught my attention several months before, as did his goddess drawings, and I was eager to read the collection of poems he had written while restoring the John Penn house outside Hanover, PA during the years 1972–1975. “Restoration Letters” represents five and a half years of correspondence between Baker and the poet, editor, and translator Cid Corman, who was living at the time in Kyoto running a struggling coffee shop with his wife Shizumi, a former tel