WOW! What an amazing book to compliment the knowledge gained from a meeting with Woody Walters. It is always great to have someone who is excited about his work and loves to share that excitement with others.

as an amateur photographer of florida, i am constantly looking for beauty in my surroundings w/ no such luck. i was at an exhibit for florida's coastal waterways by todd something and went to the gift shop to buy his book, right next to woody walter's, and left with this one instead. although it's b&w, one does not need color to see through the eyes and lenses of mr. walters. your mind fills that in. you're standing on the beach in the photographs or you're face to face w/ his animal subjects. even the quality of print is perfect. the transition from negative or slide film onto carbon copy makes no difference at all.

Visions of Florida is a breathtaking journey through a parts of Florida that few Floridians get to see, let alone tourists. Mr. Walters has done a masterful job in bringing out the true color of the people in his black & white images. This fine art book sits alone in it's perpetual home on my coffee table. There is seldom a day that I don't pick it up to be momentarily transported to another world. House guests will often spend hours lost in the splendor of these pages. I am anxiously awaiting Mr. Walter's next book.

Lola Haskins most recent volume of poetry is one of her finest. Haskins "has taught Computer Science at the University of Florida since the late 1970's, and lives on a farm outside Gainesville with her husband, Gerald, and assorted dogs, cats, ducks, and peacocks." Thus she could rightly be called a 'regional poet,' but her stretch and breath go much farther and deeper than that. This poet was not formed by the Iowa workshop. She is, instead: direct, frank, funny, honest, painful. She reminds me of Emily Dickinson, with her microscopic attention to detail, the hard work it must take to build image on top of image, and in her private, odd manner and cadences. One imagines how many poems Haskins has not written or published, and reads carefully between her lines. In a sequence like "Six Ways" to play a staccato, the images build (almost absentmindedly) from "The beehived secretary's brisk heels/click across the polished floor" to "He was wondering over red or white roses. The barrage/comes so quickly it seems all one sound." I love how she begins a poem by saying, "In Florida, when the forty-foot limo slows, Mickey Mouse gets out." The fourth section of the book is the most personal, in that it evokes strong feelings and memories about her parents. Many of those poems are written in near prose, as if Haskins is careful not to turn her memories easily into poetry. There are no resolutions in those poems, but not any self-pity either. Sometimes, in all of her books, Haskins seems to view her own life from a bemused, interested distance. But the reader feels very close to this poet and her world indeed.

The Rim Benders: Poems And Discourses is an impressive selection of moving, evocative, sometimes frightening free verse poems by Lola Haskins, winner of the 1994 Emily Dickinson Prize from the Poetry Society of America. The essence and spirt of Mexican culture is a particularly memorable theme in her work. Under a spreading sky, blue-pink as a wild egg, / a woman makes a bouquet of her life; / baby's breath, alyssum, sweet lobelia, / rosebuds of palest gold.