Free Verse
Marsh River Editions

Catch and Release
Chasing Saturday Night
in search of "Green Dolphin Street"
Lines on Lake Winnebago
Loose Change
Mead
Saying Grace
Slightly Off Q
Something Near the Dance Floor
Waiting For Beethoven
Walnut from Waterloo

"Large Mouth Bass"

Every veined leaf
reflects my centered life,
their yellowed texture
is now my mapped life history
of wasted and vapid nights,
drunk with murmurs,
water hissing around my dock,
and I, a white-bearded fisherman,
squint at cane poles, wet line,
wooden bobbers.

My lines mark the water,
leave ripples for an instant while
below
my hooks hold worms--
tantalizing treats that beckon with
a squirming that says come hither--
I've got nothing to hide, come and
get me--
big mouth.

People who prize words as much as they do fish may want to bring Gary C. Busha's new 33-page chapbook along with their tackle box. ... These plain-spoken poems blend detailed observations drawn from angling with coming-of-age anecdotes and an occasional barb of philosophy.

-Jim Higgins
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Lines on Lake Winnebago offers Gary Busha at his best, the language spare and quietly conversational, carefully chosen to evoke all the senses. These vivid moments in one fisherman's life become a celebration of experience, from the apprenticeship of youth to the reflectiveness of age.

- Nadine S. St. Louis
poet

These poems taste like wine--they warm going down, can raise a shiver the body is helpless to prevent. I can only read two or three of these poems at a time, before I stop to reflect, remember, while completely under the spell of a primal song. Then, I pick up the story again. What we have here is the flowering of a personal mythology. Joseph Campbell has asked us what myth do we live, and this is Gary Busha's answer. Stories need a stage--Lake Winnebago. And actors: father, friends, family. Stories need the deep image--a great fish turning below the ice, and its slow descent. Add to this the need for myth to be bigger than our lives or world, stronger than the elements, and elusive as brown pincers hidden under shore rocks.

- Michael Koehler
poet

Gary Busha writes about fishing on Lake Winnebago the way some poets write about love. Some days "...the baited nightcrawler / scrapes bottom /only to tempt, / entice." Some days "Nothing bites." Some days "To see sunrise / in the web of a perch tail / is a technicolor dream." Go fishing with Busha. With his words at the end of your line you'll fall in love with the "lean river boys" and the "old men with big yellow bellies." His "hooks hold worms-- / tantalizing treats that beckon with / a squirming that says come hither-- / I've got nothing to hide, / come and / get me..."

- Mariann Ritzer
poet