NONZEN POEMS, by Morgan Gibson. Printed Matter Press, 2010, 100 pp., $15 (paper)

Translator, scholar and poet Morgan Gibson's collection "Nonzen Poems" divides into four parts concerned variously with breath, nature, Buddhism, and the author's mentors and contemporaries — notably Kenneth Rexroth and Allen Ginsberg.

As a collection, the poems embed various images, poetic cliches — snow, woods, clouds, the moon — in an already/always internalized content. That is, Gibson renders anew by form the poetic content a reader often encounters. And if one takes breath as "inspiration" (or vice versa), then breath creates the form:

I am how I breathe