Posted on: Sunday, May 15, 2005
Not just another pretty gift book
By Wanda Adams
Advertiser Staff Writer
"A LITERARY LEI: Flowers & Plants of Hawai'i" by Jim & Virginia Wageman; Watermark Publishing, paper, $19.95
The book is a series of facing-page sets: a photo of a flower or plant, a brief backgrounder on the plant and a thoughtfully chosen bit of good writing.
Widely read and well-traveled, with a deep understanding of both art and literature, veterans of the local book publishing scene, the Wagemans bring all the strains of their knowledge and their aesthetic to the book, and it shows.
The literary excerpts — from both prose and poetry — begin, appropriately, with the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation chant. But other choices are less predictable: poems by Juliet Kono, Haunani-Kay Trask and other lesser-known writers, snippets of hapa-haole song lyrics, doggerel by Don Blanding, passages from novels as well as history books.
This would, indeed, make a lovely gift for someone who enjoys both literature and nature.
This beautiful book is the last collaboration of the photographer/designer, writer/editor team of Jim and Virginia Wageman. Virginia, who had served as The Advertiser's art critic, died in 2003 at the age of 62. But this was a project begun before Virginia fell ill, selecting Island-based poems and literature to pair with Jim Wageman's photographs of Hawai'i flora. The work is far above the usual run of pretty-with-pretty gift books.
