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BOOKS Four Decades on My Tanka Road by Sanford Goldstein. Edited by Fran M. Witham with a Preface by Patricia Prime. Modern English Tanka Press: Baltimore, MD, 2007. ISBN 978-0-6151-8005-2. Perfect Bound, 6 x 9 inches, insideoutside by Stanley Pelter. George Mann Publications: Winchester, Hampshire, England, 2008. ISBN 9780955241574. Perfect Bound, 6 x 9 inches, 128 pp., £8 UK. this hunger, tissue-thin: new and selected tanka, 1995-2005 by Larry Kimmel. With a Preface by Sanford Goldstein & an Introduction by Linda Jeannette Ward. Modern English Tanka Press: Baltimore, MD, 2007. ISBN 978-0-6151-8246-9. Perfect Bound, 6 x 9 inches, 120 pp., $17.95 US. Dover Beach and My Back Yard: BHS Haibun Anthology 2007. Selection and Commentaries by Colin Blundell and Graham High. BHS Bookshop at www.britishhaikusociety.org. ISBN: 978-1-906333-00-3. Perfect Bound, 5 ½” x 7”, 72 pp., £7 UK, $10 US. Quarter Past Sometime by Jeffrey Harpeng. Post Pressed: Teneriffe, Qld., Australia, 2007. ISBN: 9-78192121-4172. Perfect Bound, 5 x 8 inches, 36 pp., $15 Aus. Cigarette Butts and Lilacs by Andrew Riutta. Modern English Tanka Press: Baltimore, MD, 2008. ISBN 978-0-6151-9445-5. Perfect Bound, 6 x 9 inches, Scent of Jasmine and Brine by Linda Jeannette Ward. Inkling Press: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9737674-3-8. Perfect Bound, 5 x 8 inches, 116 pp., $20 Cdn. stepping stones by Janice M. Bostok. Post Pressed: Teneriffe, Qld., Australia, 2007. ISBN: 978-1921214-07-3. Perfect Bound, 5 x 8 inches, 54 pp., $15 Aus. The Woman without a Hole & Other Risky Themes from Old Japanese Poems: 18-19c senryu . . . (also available as) Octopussy, Dry Kidney & Blue Spots: or senryu compiled, translated and essayed, by Robin D. Gill. Paraverse Press. Perfect bound, 7 x 10 in., 500 pp, few illustrations (more online). Indexed by first lines and subject matter (Outrageous Ideas & Gross Things), with glossaries of Japanese literary terms and body parts. Available at Amazon.com or B&N online for $30. Indian Haiku: A bilingual anthology of Haiku written by 105 poets form India. Compiled, edited, and translated by Dr. Angelee Deodhar. Chandigarh, India, Spring 2008. Perfect bound, 4.5 x 7 inches, 70 pages, Sanskrit and English on facing pages. Mireasma De Tei Fragrance of Lime, renga poems by Magdalena Dale and Vasile Moldovan. Editura Fat-Frumos, Bucuresti, 2008. Perfect bound, color cover, 5.5 x 8 inches, 104 pages, ISBN: 973-552-85. Moments by Gillena Cox. Author’s House: 2007. Perfect bound, 8.5 x 8.5 inches, 66 pages, full color illustrations by Gillena Cox, Preface by Michael Baribeau, with poem by Cindy Tebo. Birds and Felines. Haiku by Giselle Maya and June Moreau. Koyama Press, 84750 Saint Martin de Castillon, France E-mail contact. Preface by Michael McClintock, calligraphy by Yasou Mizui. Hand-tied handmade papers, 6.5 x 9 inches, 40 pages, illustrated. Price $25; postage $7. History and other Poems from a Danish Exile by Don Ammons. Poetry Monthly Press: 2008. Poetry Monthly Press, 39 Cavendish road, Long Eaton, Nottingham, NG10 4HY Great Britain, Staple bound, 5.5 x 8.5 inches, 40 pages, £5, ISBN:978-1-906357-19-1. The Whole Body Singing. Published on behalf of the Quendryth Young by DRAGONWICK, PO Box 4210, Goonellabah NSW 2480, Australia printed and bound in Australia by Modern Haiga : A Work in Progress Denis M. Garrison, editor-in-chief Alexis Rotella, Liam Wilkinson, Linda Papanicolau, Raffael de Gruttola, editors Modern English Tanka Press, Baltimore, MD offne Ferne by Gerd Börner, Ideedition, Hamburg, Germany, 2008 ISBN: 978-3-9812095-0-1. Perfect Bound, 12:19 cm, 166 pp, Euro 13.- post paid. Jane Reichhold: Ten Years Haikujane. 84 Seiten. AHA Books, 2008. ISBN 978-0-944676-45-5 $12. postpaid in USA oder via E_Mail: jane@ahapoetry.com Ad for Geert Verbeke's newest book with photos from Jenny, his wife. |
Four Decades on My Tanka Road by Sanford Goldstein. Edited by Fran M. Witham with a Preface by Patricia Prime. Modern English Tanka Press: Baltimore, MD, 2007. ISBN 978-0-6151-8005-2. Perfect Bound, 6 x 9 inches, Four Decades on My Tanka Road conveniently reprints under one cover the six tanka collections of Sanford Goldstein, from This Tanka World (1977) to Encounters in This Penny World (2005) – close to 500 poems by the man many acknowledge as the “father of tanka in English.” As such, the book is not only a testimony to the artistic achievement of one man but a document of historical value as well, providing ready witness to the burgeoning success of the tanka movement. Such a broad retrospective collection would not have been economically feasible ten years ago. Goldstein established a reputation as an able translator of Japanese literature long before publishing his first book of tanka and in his career as translator he has brought over into English many of Japan’s premier 20th century tanka poets such as Shiki, Mokichi, Takuboku and Akiko. In the “Postscript to This Tanka World,” Goldstein writes It was Takuboku who brought tanka closest to colloquial language while guarding its poetic element, Takuboku who said that the tanka need not restrict itself to thirty-one syllables, Takuboku who taught me that tanka is a diary of the emotional changes in a man’s life. (75) The emphasis on “diary” seems like apt description, if one judges by Goldstein’s tanka, which often assume a casual and effortless air while delving into the most commonplace events and things: carried (45) cold night (48) The analogy of tanka and diary finds even greater justification in the long tanka sequence, At the Hut of the Small Mind (1992): gaining clutching I came, (139) The method of the diarist lends itself to the confessional, of course, and this element is frequent in Goldstein’s work: only a one-sentence (199) More often that not, the intimacy of such visions is broadened by the poet’s ability to apply to the personal incident, no matter how everyday or introverted the initial perspective, a greater signification: I kept by the shallow water (233) Apart from the surface simplicity of his style, Goldstein is not without a wit to delight in such scenes as the following with its allusion to the essay of Jonathan Swift: she fell at once (257) Four Decades on My Tanka Road is truly one of a kind. An overdue recognition of long years of quiet labor, Goldstein’s book marks also the coming of age of tanka in the West. The cover design, layout and binding all fulfill the professional standards of former MET Press books and, together, these factors make the book a bargain for the private reader or public library. Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward
insideoutside by Stanley Pelter. George Mann Publications: Winchester, Hampshire, England, 2008. ISBN 9780955241574. Perfect Bound, 6 x 9 inches, 128 pp., £8 UK. insideoutside – third of a planned six volume series of haibun by the British writer Stanley Pelter – confirms his often stated predilection for writing that tests the boundaries of the genre and extends the many varied experiments of past imperfect (2004) and & Y Not? (2006), his two earlier collections. The author generously collects and presents in alphabetical order nearly 70 haibun – everything from haibun that blend free verse, instead of prose, with haiku to texts where a graphic element assumes a place beside prose and verse as an integral unit of composition. There are even haibun written for recitation, whether for solo or group performance. Because the narrow compass of a review will not allow full discussion of Pelter’s numerous innovations, selected examples will have to suffice to represent the variety of his work. In “Thunderguy – Isle of Arran,” the prose half of the normative haibun equation (prose plus verse) is supplanted by free verse passages that alternate with the haiku: a moon Grey and more some deep Town clothes, town shoes, town socks What is interesting and deserving of comment is that the free-verse sections at the left margin, if read aloud, do not depart radically from the marked rhythms that prose in poetic haibun often adopts. Pelter’s earlier books introduced the graphic component as a third element, along with prose and verse, of haibun composition. His exploration along this line is perhaps more extensive than elsewhere and includes texts accompanied by very simple (almost primitive) pen and ink sketches, texts presented in comic strip format, texts where a proliferation of type fonts and point sizes underscores meaning and texts where the haibun is handwritten, an act that points to authorial presence and immediacy. One remarkable series of three haibun, “ceci n’est pas une haibune?” (21-24), serves to illustrate Pelter’s program well – the ironic title being a doffing of the hat (a bowler no doubt) to René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist whose simple painting of a pipe bore the inscription, “ceci n’est pas une pipe, i.e., “this is not a pipe.” The first haibun in this series juxtaposes free verse with what looks like a simple linocut of a guillemot in flight. The second offers a relatively standard model of contemporary haibun – haiku, prose and haiku, in this instance – but the adjacent page presents the original text now revised and reconfigured, now part of a black-and-white illustration, now with the text itself presented alternately in handwritten and cut-out letters. The third member of this series advances one further step, dividing the page into two columns, a handwritten haibun text to the left, a collage of what appears to be an old-style IBM digital punch-card with an ink drawing to the right. Another technique Pelter favors, as in “from bialystok song is to,” is to frame a text with its sound values foremost – the haibun designed for recitation: from bialystok to from bialystok to from bialystok to this railway track to that railway track to that to that to that to that from this from this to that to here from there to back to front to YES to there to there from here from here from there from there from where to where … (29) Work of this nature echoes earlier avant-garde assays in sound poetry such as Tristan Tzara’s “L'amiral Cherche Une Maison à Louer” (1916) or Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate” (1921). Similar effect is achieved in the title haibun where the concatenation of phrases repeated with slight variation appeals to the reader first on the aural level, its lyric tone being rather bittersweet and elegiac as the following excerpt will show: so i will wait for U in the garden ~ sit in the garden that has just been watered ~ waiting for a buttercup to close ~ a buttercup on the grass that waits to be cut ~ the grass just watered … in the enclosed garden ~ i sit here for U ~ alone with sounds scents of breeze ~ wait for U to come ~ enclosed by greens ~ the enclosed garden just watered … i go inside to outside ~ wait for U in the garden just watered … i say ‘yes’ ~ i say ‘yes’ to inside ~ i say ‘yes’ to outside ~ so i will wait for U in the garden ~ sit in the garden that has just been watered. (42) insideoutside, an attractive trade paperback with a glossy full-color collage cover, is available directly from the author for the price of shipping and handling while copies last. Interested parties may inquire of the author at 5 School Lane, Claypole, Newark NG23 5BQ or via e-mail. Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward
this hunger, tissue-thin: new and selected tanka, 1995-2005 by Larry Kimmel. With a Preface by Sanford Goldstein & an Introduction by Linda Jeannette Ward. Modern English Tanka Press: Baltimore, MD, 2007. ISBN 978-0-6151-8246-9. Perfect Bound, 6 x 9 inches, 120 pp., $17.95 US. This selection from a ten year period in Larry Kimmel’s tanka career will afford an excellent introduction to the poet, to his chief concerns as a man and artist. this hunger, tissue-thin is arranged in six broadly thematic sections and presents roughly 180 tanka. From the point of view of style, Kimmel writes interesting minimalist tanka for which he is well-known but his compositions in the fuller form, with close approximation to the 31 syllable norm of waka, are accomplished also. His assays in the bare-bones type of the five-line verse focus frequently on wit and wordplay we meet (105)
but also lean closely, on occasion, to the spare and sketchy style of haiku what delighted me most
The above examples read smoothly and show that the poet is confident, competent and at ease in his craft. Kimmel has delighted readers with many such ‘abbreviated’ tanka over the years. When he allows himself the broader canvas of 31 or roughly 31 syllables, however, the poet risks more, meaning: his failures are more frequent but his successes, when they do come, are even more remarkable. His imagery in the longer tanka can be strikingly original while avoiding mere idiosyncrasy: a wicker of branches (30)
the wee crystal ball
The “wicker of branches” in the first tanka above is apt description of the wintry scene but also serves to connect nature very effectively to the domesticity of the weeping woman. The rich language of the second, with a boy’s marble transformed into a “crystal ball” and the ample color and flavor of “moisty, green-veiled,” evokes a gentle reverie of time and innocence lost. Kimmel’s willingness to push the limits and test the pliability of language isn’t always so fairly executed however: daybreak unfolds (35) The comparison of daybreak and “an unexpected dollar,” by virtue of their unfolding, is not as clever as it is a straining for special effect and the punning wordplay achieved by the lineation of “…break / fast …,” in the end, proves rather trite. Such misses are relatively rare in this collection, however, where the reader is more likely to meet the quiet elegiac tone of here where the river (58)
or a finely detailed description that is quite lyrical
level clean-edged roof lines (65) or bristling with the multiplicity of possible narratives reading a romance (79) this hunger, tissue-thin is an attractively designed book and closely edited by the poet to allow the reader to compare or contrast individual tanka which are here displayed at their best. What a fine companion this book would make for a spring jaunt or for the confinement of a cold winter day! Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward
Dover Beach and My Back Yard: BHS Haibun Anthology 2007. Selection and Commentaries by Colin Blundell and Graham High. BHS Bookshop at www.britishhaikusociety.org. ISBN: 978-1-906333-00-3. Perfect Bound, 5 ½” x 7”, 72 pp., £7 UK, $10 US. Released early in this calendar year, the British Haiku Society’s biennial haibun anthology showcases 25 haibun by 15 contributors. Each haibun is accompanied by a commentary that the editors penned jointly, a shift in emphasis from the last BHS collection, edited by David Cobb and Ken Jones, wherein the editors offered their independent and often conflicting views. A wide variety in style, subject, and tone is achieved in Dover Beach and My Back Yard and the level of writing is consistently high. Choosing good compositions to comment upon is relatively easy for the reviewer, a circumstance which promises fair compensation to the curious reader. Charles Hansmann, who has established a distinctive voice in contemporary haibun, offers the very atmospheric and brooding, “At Sea,” in which his skillful and precise description is demonstrated at its best: Every morning there’s a clatter of clam shells on the deck and gulls swooping down to their breakfast. They’re defiant, but wary, and when With “Church Going,” Bamboo Shoot offers pointed observations that are enlivened by his crisply paced prose: My road took me through the small village of Damerham, where a large CHURCH FLOWER FESTIVAL notice was fixed to a tall hedge. Larkin-like, certainly no church connoisseur, I stopped; and passing through the thick, ochre-lichened walls into a sweet-smelling almost cuttable cold, it came again – the elusive sense of being elsewhere. (18) A “sweet-smelling almost cuttable cold” mixes the olfactory and tangible in a terse and wholly convincing fashion. It is the sharp detail of such sensory perceptions that supports Bamboo Shoot’s frequent parenthetical but telling asides: “Larkin-like, certainly no church connoisseur….” This poet owns an uncanny ability to objectify his own “sense of being elsewhere” in his observations of his immediate environment and of his fellow occupants: …two elderly ladies – strangely still wearing woolen cardigans and tweed skirts – hardly seemed there at all in any material sense …. Their whispers seemed to live out their own brief lives – hanging in the air, crisp as winter breath, before dying away to vanish into the stonework. (18) “Dover Beach and My Back Yard,” the haibun that lends its title to this anthology, comes by way of Ray Rasmussen of Alberta. This composition is immediately appealing in its economy of means: simple comparison and contrast. The poet’s daughter does the gardening while the poet rocks “back and forth in the newly hung hammock”; a copy of Arnold’s “Dover Beach” lies open while the daily news, with its war reportage, “is cast aside.” Rasmussen meditates upon the loss of faith that was the theme of Arnold’s poem but even before his explicit rejection of that, the very unity of the domestic backyard scene -- kittens playing, a dog gnawing a bone, nuthatches nesting -- foreshadows the poet’s simultaneous acceptance of hard realities and his determination to enjoy life as is: “,,, Matthew, family and garden must suffice for now (30).” Doris Heitmeyer, in “Sound of Jackhammers,” compares the building façade under repair in New York City to the same tenement “due for an overhaul when I moved in 50 years ago (52).” The sight evokes vivid recollections of her youth as a single girl in the city with the frequent counterpoint of the scene now: her old tenement “boarded up,” “street kids lounging under the scaffold” – or her hesitant, feeble and aging steps counter to the “little hip hop dance” of the kids on the street. A closing haiku affords a strong summary of past and present: The pigeon flies a straw (53) The commentaries of editors Colin Blundell and Graham High are generally practical, informative, and revealing. Time after time, they pick out the weak spot in a given composition or provide an accurate appreciation of the understated strengths of a particular haibun. These commentaries are not without hazard, however, as in the following remarks that were inspired by Hansmann’s “At Sea”: The presiding view that haibun prose should be unobtrusive and exhibit subtlety and lightness of touch is difficult to balance against the desire to write prose that is striking, memorable and original. (13) The above assertion that a “presiding view” exists would seem to be an invention of the editors or, perhaps, a phenomenon observed in their immediate milieu. It is not a claim that I have seen advanced commonly on that side or on this side of the water. Editors, however, should be granted some poetic license in promulgating their own literary opinions, so the damage here is not great. Elsewhere, however, a similar uncritical attitude on the part of the editors leads to some embarrassment as in the following notations on Doris Heitmeyer’s “Luna Moth”: One can only wish that Blundell and High had consulted that encyclopedia, a small effort that would have solved the “strangely haunting image” and great mystery of “an ordinary sphinx.” For Heitmeyer’s sphinx is a rather ordinary and common moth after all. No book is free of error, however, and on the positive side, Blundell and High raise the bar for future BHS anthologies in selecting very strong work and providing incisive and helpful critical reaction overall. Beyond the few haibun commented upon here, Dover Beach and My Back Yard includes excellent works by many well-known practitioners of haibun such as David Cobb, Jim Kacian, Jane Whittle, Ken Jones, Jeffrey Harpeng and Lynne Rees. The book itself is a handsome and portable perfect bound volume, one that I readily recommend. Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward
Quarter Past Sometime by Jeffrey Harpeng. Post Pressed: Teneriffe, Qld., Australia, 2007. ISBN: 9-78192121-4172. Perfect Bound, 5 x 8 inches, 36 pp., $15 Aus. New Zealander Jeffrey Harpeng, now resident in Australia, writes haibun in a rich voice akin to the rhythms of much modernist verse, say, Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos or Basil Bunting’s Briggflats. The example of Bunting is most apropros because Harpeng’s haibun are not only replete with historical and cultural allusions a la Pound but also, like the Northumbrian Bunting, remain stubbornly loyal to their immediate locale, to regional history and to local speech-patterns and place-names, whether the chosen setting is a lush green headland on volcanic Banks Peninsula in New Zealand’s South Island or a desolate backcountry cemetery in an Australia brittle with drought. On the low stone wall above the beach, there are a couple of rusty cauldrons once used for rendering whale blubber. They gather leaves, gather wind-drift, gather trash. My imagination rivets great copper handles to them, and a hotplate of magma rises to brew Turkish coffee. I spice it with cardamom and sweeten it with a sugar-bag of sugar, enough coffee, enough sugar to string out the minor gods of place, to stew all time in a sweet brown cloud. Let that be drunk and the ensuing dream be a clear blue sky and us walking, a child here and another there. How they run ahead. So he writes in “Akaroa – Remote Viewing,” with the fine descriptive detail that is characteristic of his observation of landscape and his cognizance of that same land’s history. In a prelude to “Australia Day 2007,” Harpeng begins, “Sitting on the back porch, looking south, a thousand miles and more of drought in that direction and to my right twice that much and more (31).” Deprivation and death are the main themes in this work wherein the drought-stricken terrain itself becomes an invasive force. Farther along, the poet introduces us to his deaf brother in a cemetery scene: I am with my brother and mother. A man in a Hawaiian shirt asks directions. He seems to be subtitling himself, making shy sign language below his chest as he talks to us. We don’t know the suburb of the dead he is looking for. The base blue of his shirt is fathoms darker than the sky. among the sleeping The man in the Hawaiian shirt is already a whole congregation away. (32) The elegiac note is sounded and deepens as this haibun now progresses to Harpeng’s grief over his mother’s mortality: Before the road winds up the Marburg Ranges, there’s a straight past the place selling potted roses. drought One of the most endearing qualities of this book is found in the unguarded but unsentimental tenderness that the poet reserves for members of his family. We meet his brother, again, in “Kaikoura”: At the sea’s edge, I estimate compass setting, point out from the rocks, Quarter Past Sometime collects thirteen haibun and two variations on the sonnet. another form that the poet shows an affinity for. Haibun by the baker’s dozen may strike the reader as a slender offering but Harpeng’s works are often longer than what one commonly reads in haikai journals. They also employ a complex association of images and very rich diction, circumstances which add to the gravity or density of the individual titles. If I were drawing up a list of the ten most interesting haikai books of the last year, Quarter Past Sometime would rate highly, and is therefore recommended to the reader. Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward
Cigarette Butts and Lilacs by Andrew Riutta. Modern English Tanka Press: Baltimore, MD, 2008. ISBN 978-0-6151-9445-5. Perfect Bound, 6 x 9 inches, “…some of these poems are black and white negatives that were never nice enough to become photographs in the family albums,” writes Andrew Riutta in the preface to his first book-length collection of tanka. “Think not that they are unique stories: they are but a few glimpses of so many homes across America.” Those comments are a frank introduction to and honest assessment of the author’s matter-of-fact, no-nonsense, unvarnished naturalism and to his gritty and unique voice. Who cares if my belly Andrew Riutta hails from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a place where Very little grows One constant motif in his tanka collection is the rural poverty and social deprivation that attends his native region as clearly depicted above or in the tough understatement and irony of the following: All the way (13) A second constant in Riutta’s book is found in the acceptance and grace, the redemption afforded by what is near and dear: It’s difficult to tell (63) Perhaps no style and no poet is without some fault or limitation. Riutta’s tough exterior sometimes cracks under its own weight and lends itself to easy sentiment as in Small bits of gravel (9) or he wavers and the trite and precious observation replaces his “slice of life” ethos: Too broke (91) Courage and honesty, as well as a muscular and clean style, are the more common characteristics of Riutta’s first book, however, as in of that big gravel pit, (44) Cigarette Butts and Lilacs is divided into “two chapters: ‘Gravity’ and ‘Grace’” with roughly 90 tanka, one per page. It possesses the professional production qualities of all Modern English Tanka Press volumes but, more than that, is in possession of a powerful new voice in American tanka and one with its own inimitable tone: It screeches to a stop, (81)
Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward
Scent of Jasmine and Brine by Linda Jeannette Ward. Inkling Press: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9737674-3-8. Perfect Bound, 5 x 8 inches, 116 pp., $20 Cdn. Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward The compass of Linda Jeannette Ward’s tanka in this new collection will scarcely admit of broad topical or social subjects but focuses, instead, upon the narrower domesticities of a woman’s life – her engagement with family, lovers and friends, her confrontation with acts of separation and death, her bittersweet motifs of love fulfilled and love forsaken. A reader comes away from Scent of Jasmine and Brine, however, with the conviction that Ward’s restrictions are self-imposed, that she freely chooses the near-and-dear precisely because she is so receptive and alive to what is intimate. The reader will also appreciate in Ward that certain sign of poetry: the ability to transform the everyday into something new, to make of the commonplace something marvelous: what world did you inhabit wedged behind Mother’s photo
Ward writes notably well and frequently on erotic themes: cover me it hasn’t stopped
When this author does falter, as in the following, last spring’s golden koi one suspects that the introspective and confined nature of her enterprise is partly to blame and that the “vague glimmer” and “hampered movement” are symptomatic. Where Ward employs this motif of confinement and frustration in a manner that allows her to focus on the larger world, however, her increase in facility is readily apparent: meeting The design and layout of Scent of Jasmine and Brine – one tanka per page, four approximately equal sections – complement the poet’s graceful and delicate gift, so replete with fine sensory perceptions and sensual airs: from our final
Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward
stepping stones by Janice M. Bostok. Post Pressed: Teneriffe, Qld., Australia, 2007. ISBN: 978-1921214-07-3. Perfect Bound, 5 x 8 inches, 54 pp., $15 Aus. This newest book by Janice M. Bostok, widely-known Australian haijin, marries prose and verse into a moving memoir of her life as the young mother of an autistic son. stepping stones, then, is not a collection of individual haibun as much as it is an episodic summary of two lives with the chief events now related in a factual confessional prose style, now in contemporary free-verse, now in a brief haibun with or without accompanying haiku. Bostok deftly sketches her son’s early problems with spatial orientation in the following way: When we were out walking and he was in the pusher he would cringe back from bushes which hung over fences onto the footpath …. The shrub would be quite a distance away from him. The expository detail which serves to establish both background and atmosphere in the narrative of Tony, the poet’s son, is sometimes finely nuanced, sometimes raw, and searing: Travelling with a rigidly autistic child in the car is always a difficult experience at the best of times. Not liking his routine to be interrupted, he would often lie down and go stiff, refusing unequivocally to enter the vehicle. Other times I might get him into his car seat and before I could drive off he would begin to scream until he became so distressed that he would vomit. If he was sick before I actually left the property I could abort the trip and stay home. Many times I simply had to turn the car around a few kilometers down the road …. With the rich context of the prose for support, Bostok’s haiku and tanka resonate deeply: pregnant again … foetus kicks The expressive haikai passages in the prose – many acceptable as stand alone haibun, with or without attendant haiku – employ many of the techniques that Western haiku also avails itself of: absence of punctuation, quiet understatement and parsimonious phrasing: another address to locate in an unfamiliar city i can now find my way to the Autistic Centre but accommodation has been offered in an unused nursing home …. at night the kitchen is bleak with windows which look out to a block retaining wall holding a cut-away bank in the hillside most of the nursing home is closed off from use by the fire doors half-way down the long hallway Tony and i the only occupants feeling enclosed i walk towards the glass doors and the main entrance beyond as i walk a ghostly figure in a long night gown approaches from the opposite direction for a moment i feel the panic then i realize as i stand in front of the wide glass doors that my reflection is looking anxiously back at me (36) stepping stones is not free of stylistic flaws nor perfect in its overall construction but deficiencies in form here find compensation in the courage and honesty wherewith Bostok addresses a deeply personal and difficult subject, her manner rising at times to the acute elegiac tone of i look at my son a rosebud that didn’t unfurl plucked too soon perhaps a bud which cannot blossom …. (52) This book, in the end, may be less aesthetic manifesto than a document of the frailty of the human condition and its redemption by love. I commend it to the reader as such, with the fine one-line haiku which serves as its sub-title: sun on the stepping stone the distance deceiving Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward
The Woman without a Hole & Other Risky Themes from Old Japanese Poems: 18-19c senryu . . . (also available as) Octopussy, Dry Kidney & Blue Spots: or senryu compiled, translated and essayed, by Robin D. Gill. Paraverse Press. Perfect bound, 7 x 10 in., 500 pp, few illustrations (more online). Indexed by first lines and subject matter (Outrageous Ideas & Gross Things), with glossaries of Japanese literary terms and body parts. Available at Amazon.com or B&N online for $30. If you like sex, dislike the holier-than-thou attitude of haiku educators, want to disobey the command that haiku must be Zen inspired, and have long wondered that the sexiest haiku the Japanese can come up with – at least in translation – read Robin D. Gill’s latest book. For English readers, there has been considerable confusion about the way the Japanese categorize and name and rename their simple short-form poems. Gill ponders and examples the many puzzling terms –the main discussion being in the bulk of the foreword, oddly relegated to the appendix – and finally sums up his selection as “dirty senryu,” which is a pity, for ten or twenty percent of the poems are the capping verses from maekuzuki, verses from renga or even folk songs, all of which Gill translates as they are meant to be, as raw as the head of an emerging baby (there actually is one mentioning such!), rather than losing them in the usual pretty phrasing of modern translation or, worse, bowdlerizing them into haiku. Ah, but you, dear Reader, do not want to know about wars of definition and naming woes. I did mention sex. There is plenty of it here in The Woman without a Hole. Perhaps you are wondering whom or what is a woman without a hole? She was a poet of love and she has her own chapter. I will say no more. How about inventive devices, ways of masturbation? You will discover a brave new world of it in old Japan. There is no way or means of sex not covered in this book. It is the Karma Sutra of the Japanese, only in verse, and both translated and explained with more good humor and delight than ever before. Robin D. Gill is truly one of our best translators of the Japanese into English. He is more accurate than Blyth, more discerning than Donald Keene, a better haiku poet in English than Lucien Stryk, and far sexier than Hiroaki Sato. The only one who even comes close to the level of Gill’s translations is Makoto Ueda and Gill has learned from him. But Ueda cannot relax and meet us on our ground. Gill can. He also does something no translator to my knowledge has ever done. For many poems, Gill gives two to six variations (in another book, he gave twelve!) of his translations. Odd, perhaps, but they work because they show better than any commentary how rich our languages (Japanese and English) are when it comes to sex. Sex. Gill deserves more kudos for it, too. A writer of “chick lit” I know has said that writing about the sex is the hardest part. Each reader seems to have a built-in level of “acceptable” terms for describing sex and if the author leaps over that line, mouths turn down and the book is closed. If the descriptions are too general the reader is not aroused and loses interest. Gill has done a fascinating tightrope walk, letting the original poem, i.e., its degree of finesse or rudeness; determine his terms for sex, the participants, and their body parts. Genius. Thus, the reader is treated to the whole range of possibilities. And, in addition to the multiple translations and glosses of the poem (usually kanji, romaji, and word-for-word), Gill does something the conventional invisible translator takes pains to avoid: he occasionally entertains us by explaining words and ideas tested but abandoned on the way, allowing us to feel we, too, know what’s what. Gill does not assume that readers do not want to no more than they have to. He thinks readers will want to enjoy some of the adventure, or to use the term so loved by critics, the process. So, in his commentary, we often discover how Gill came to know these fascinating bits of the Japanese’s hidden sexual practices: these tidbits are rich enough by themselves to be a book. To leave the Japanese as naked as he is, this man bares all of his humanity. Reviewing a book with thirty chapters, all about sex or body parts below the belt, leaves the reviewer with a special problem: how can I pick examples of the poems without revealing my own sexual interests? So, I shall open it at random (not a bad way to approach a book more like a stream than a highway). Whew! On the first try, – we have one for the family web site: shiri kara wa iya da to jisan o hana ni kake (the book has Japanese above) I may be a dog no doggy style no doggy style no, not doggy-style
Often the best parts of the poem are the essays, notes, and comments on it. I enjoy observing Gill’s mind move from one poem to another. Like reading a renga, it is fascinating (if you can get your mind off the sex) to study his leaps and how they are formed. His author photo at Red Room shows him pole-vaulting in a bamboo grove, and his mind does indeed leap around a lot, and for all the wonderful exercise it provides, he leaves us behind at times when he forgets that many of his readers may not be as intelligent and well-read as he is. Not everyone knows both Japanese and English, or has read, and remembered so much of Shakespeare and other English poets. Gill does not pretend to offer the last word or a definitive analysis of what a haiku, senryu, maeku, or zappai is, but he does give the reader enough relevant material to form his or her own, hopefully tentative opinion. Not all will approve of this Wiki wackiness, but Gill’s open, growth-oriented approach is surely the future for all education in an age where continual on-line updating – if you have time, do not forget to see his errata and glosses online at Paraverse.org – is possible. Yes, this reviewer is biased! Very much so. I feel Robin D. Gill is the best highway we have into the Japanese mind and poetry and it is the shame of our art/poetry scene that he has to publish these marvelous, magnificent books himself. If you cannot afford to pay his printer’s bill, at least show your appreciation for his work by buying it. Not that it will put you out of pocket, either. Price is something I do not generally mention in a review, but one reason Gill publishes himself is to keep the price down, way down compared to most books of similarly complex design with abundant Japanese in the body of the text published by academic presses or all but the largest publishers. This most recent work with 1,300 poems on 500 essay and translation-packed pages retails for only $30. So buy this book as a contribution to the culture of translation, your good-deed-of-the-week and for years of pleasurable reading as your sexual (and literary) needs develop and change. Afterword: Do not be confused by the two titles for this book. Like Whitman with his multitudes in the gross generosity of his mind, Gill could not settle on just one title, so some copies have The Woman title in front and the Octopussy in back, and vice versa. No matter which one you pick up, the text pages, each and every one designed by the author, are all the same – all great.
Indian Haiku: A bilingual anthology of haiku written by 105 poets form India. Compiled, edited, and translated by Dr. Angelee Deodhar. Chandigarh, India, Spring 2008. Perfect bound, 4.5 x 7 inches, 70 pages, Sanskrit and English on facing pages. Again Dr. Angelee Deodhar has given the haiku literature of India an incredible gift. In addition to all her other efforts, now she has collected haiku from poets of India, even those living in other parts of the world. Lynx readers will recognize the name of R. K. Singh. His haiku is:
While many of the haiku exhibit more clearly other forms of literature, the beauty of the Indian soul and its gentle measure of the world comes across perfectly as haiku. This poem by Dr. Bindu Ji Mahara, while joyfully smashing the old rule about not personifying nature, gives a marvelous image and states in a haiku something I have observed but never found the words to fit the state.
A better or more haiku-like poem also concerns seeing but correctly made the personification so ambiguous that it can apply to lakes, lilies, and persons.
Reviewed by Jane Reichhold
Mireasma De Tei Fragrance of Lime, renga poems by Magdalena Dale and Vasile Moldovan. Editura Fat-Frumos, Bucuresti, 2008. Perfect bound, color cover, 5.5 x 8 inches, 104 pages, ISBN: 973-552-85. Mireasma De Tei Fragrance of Lime, an anthology of linked poems, brings in English and Romanian, renga, tan renga and individual and sequences of haiku from these two authors who are already well-known beyond the borders of Romania. The tan-renga were already published in Lnyx and both of the authors have had their tanka published around the world. REMEDY Alluring aroma with Reviewed by Jane Reichhold
Moments by Gillena Cox. Author’s House: 2007. Perfect bound, 8.5 x 8.5 inches, 66 pages, full color illustrations by Gillena Cox, Preface by Michael Baribeau, with poem by Cindy Tebo.
Gillena Cox lives in St. James, Trinidad of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago so there is a flair of island living in the tropics also in her poems. The mother of two adult children she now spends her time with Scrabble and photographing scenes without people in them. Reviewed by Jane Reichhold
Birds and Felines. Haiku by Giselle Maya and June Moreau. Koyama Press, 84750 Saint Martin de Castillon, France E-mail contact. Preface by Michael McClintock, calligraphy by Yasou Mizui. Hand-tied handmade papers, 6.5 x 9 inches, 40 pages, illustrated. Price $25; postage $7. How good it is to take into one’s hands the softness of handmade papers and on the pages one haiku floating in the generosity of all that space. Even though the title indicates poems by both of these accomplished authors, the poems bear no indication of who wrote what – that is selflessness! The first poem, faced with an etching of the crown cranes of Japan in mating display: grass pillow Giselle, with her strong ties to Japan (she lived there and studied the way of tea and flower arranging) brings together, in this the fifteenth book in her series, Oriental sensitivity and Western innovation and boldness. The haiku, whether hers or June’s, are touching for their observation, and perfection in their execution. Reviewed by Jane Reichhold
History and other Poems from a Danish Exile by Don Ammons. Poetry Monthly Press: 2008. Poetry Monthly Press, 39 Cavendish road, Long Eaton, Nottingham, NG10 4HY Great Britain, Staple bound, 5.5 x 8.5 inches, 40 pages, £5, ISBN:978-1-906357-19-1. Don and I have known each for many years, but because he lives in Denmark, perhaps that is the reason, his work is not as well-known in the States as it should be. As Introduction he has on the back of this book: “Don Ammons was born in Georgia, U.S.A. He was a paratrooper in the United States Army for six years. He has lived in Germany, Canada and now Denmark. He has been a published writer since 1988, publishing short stories, poems and criticism in magazines in Great Britain and America. A “late bloomer,” book-wise, History is only his second collection.” The reader will not find any haiku or tanka in this book, but will be able to enjoy poems that bring the immediacy and finely based observation of images learned from these poetry forms. Rereading the poems as the book leans on my desk easel I want to quote to you the longer one such as “I KNEW A WOMAN BY A SOUTHERN SEA” and the goose-pimple tingling “ THE GIFT (THE THIRD NIGHT)” and “THE SEA, FLOOR SMOOTH.” Instead I bring you the brevity of RHYMED INTERLUDE which I hope will serve as introduction to the excellence of Don Ammon’s poems and encourage you to get the book to read and to have them all. RHYMED INTERLUDE Her Reviewed by Jane Reichhold
The Whole Body Singing. Published on behalf of the Quendryth Young by DRAGONWICK, PO Box 4210, Goonellabah NSW 2480, Australia printed and bound in Australia by
The best poems of Nippon inspiration are written in the theme and spirit of the Matsuo Basho. Like another Nippon master, Kobayashi Issa, Young has the quality to humanize nature, as in this haiku: a frog Australia is a land surrounded by water. It is natural that the land and the water of this vast country appear in her poetry in many aspects: dark beach, beach sunrise, handful of sand, water’s edge, seaweed, high tide, dawn surf and so on. Two of the most simple and water’s edge clouded sky But in our opinion the poet’s masterpiece is a haiku about land, about one’s last resting place: village cemetery Up shadows, down shadows. It is a miraculous play of the life and the death in the village cemetery. Here is certainly a sublime poem. The book ends with a haibun entitled “Mount Warning”. In a long poem in her poetry book “Naked in Sepia”, Young presents Mount Warming like an Eden’s garden. In her haiku book “The Whole Body
Modern Haiga : A Work in Progress Denis M. Garrison, editor-in-chief Alexis Rotella, Liam Wilkinson, Linda Papanicolau, Raffael de Gruttola, editors Modern English Tanka Press, Baltimore, MD Modern Haiga is the latest venture from the inexhaustible Denis Garrison and his Modern English Tanka Press. Assisted by an editorial board composed of Alexis Rotella, Liam Wilkinson, Linda Papanicolau, and Raffael de Gruttola, all of whom are likely to be known to regular readers of tanka and haiku, it has adopted the innovative format of an organic online anthology published on a flow basis, from which selections will be made for an annual print anthology. Art books being notoriously expensive and demanding an uncommon set of skills, only a few of them have been produced. Most of them have focused exclusively or principally on haiku. Modern Haiga includes tanka and other forms of short poetry, although the majority is haiku so far. Haiga has certain established principles, but editor Denis M. Garrison has made clear that Modern Haiga is open to all treatments in the illustration of short poetry. The term 'illustration' is apt, many of the works present combinations of words and images in which the image merely illustrates the poem. Generally speaking, such simplistic treatment is considered insufficient in haiga as it is traditionally practiced in the west, yet some of the illustrative tanka are quite effective. In Alexis Rotella's 'ikebana', a image of a Japanese flower arrangement featuring bamboo and anthurium is combined with the tanka: Years since In this case, the image of the poem connects to the image in the graphic, but is not a literal representation. The anthurium heart of the poem is a metaphor for something else, and so the combination of an anthurium heart with a pair of bamboo stems in the image provides a visual shock to echo the emotional shock. Another good example of the illustrative kind of haiga is Susan Constable's haiku: New Year's Day - dawn breaks the sky wide open Illustrated by a vista of a mountain scene, the pale blue sky and bright white snow cap provides a concrete image that was left unspecified by the poem. Almost any scene could have been used to illustrate the haiku, but the choice of a mountain scene imbues it with a certain majesty. Constable goes one step further by breaking the photograph into a triptych—the image is broken in a different way from the sky of the poem, yet the pale blue background of the image echoes the poem's sky. Thus has the poet played with multiple meanings, creating an subtle interplay between image and poem that enhances both. The same interplay is not present in most of the illustrative tanka. Suffice it to say, the combination of words and pictures does not add anything new to either, nor exhibit any clever formatting or composition ideas. While all of the selected works are enjoyable, there are a great many of them on the site, and so the reader becomes weary with the sameness. Several of the works are not illustrative. Instead, the poem and graphic are linked, but independent of one another. An example is Liam Wilkinson's 'harbourmaster.' A black and white photograph of a window with a large sign reading 'HARBOURMASTER' is accompanied underneath by the haiku one last kiss A lesser poet would have been tempted to include human figures and depict the parting scene, but Wilkinson has resisted the obvious. The harbormaster's window and the tide in the poem both place the encounter at the seashore, so the reader is able to image various scenarios. Is the speaker in the poem the harbormaster himself? A passenger? A fisherman? How long is he going out? And who is he kissing and leaving behind? The black and white photograph with its barred window gives a vague sense of unease to a poem that on the surface appears light-hearted. The more one studies the combination of the two, the more possibilities occur to the reader. Perhaps it is a wartime poem, and the speaker is a young man going to sea. Or perhaps the speaker is an old fisherman whose livelihood is being lost. The apt combination of image and poem serves to ask more questions than it answers, which is why juxtaposition in word and image is so highly valued in haiga. In merely illustrative combinations all the questions are answered, leaving no room for the reader's imagination. Juxtaposition is not the only technique that makes a successful haiga. Sometimes the combination is even more abstract, as in Raffael de Gruttola's 'arpeggios.' distant Poetry: Raffael de Gruttola Croteau's non-representational art suggests a stalk and twigs, but can't be definitively asserted as such. They are brown and black streaks on subtly colored paper that suggests, but does not mandate such an interpretation. That ants crawl upon sticks and twigs reinforces the idea, but there is no actual ant in the image. Had it been paired with a poem about thunder and lightning we could have easily accepted it as an abstract representation of those phenomena as well. The poem's name 'arpeggios' adds yet another layer of abstraction and complexity—the angular swishes are suggestive of the motions of a conductor's baton. Within the poem the speaker is perhaps noticing classical music being played while observing an ant, but just as possibly, the speaker is utilizing arpeggios as a metaphor for the activity of the ants. Or something else . . . Multivalence is a hallmark of the very best short tanka and haiku, and is likely to become equally important to fans of their illustrated versions. Hopefully, the print annual will focus on showcasing the finest examples from the website, but in the meantime, the website offers an interesting laboratory to experiment and experience a great variety of approaches to illustrated short poetry. Reviewed by M. Kei
offne Ferne by Gerd Börner, Ideedition, Hamburg, Germany, 2008 ISBN: 978-3-9812095-0-1. Perfect Bound, 12:19 cm, 166 pp, Euro 13.- post paid. After the stunning success of his last book, Hinterhofhitze (backyard heat), in 2005, Ideedition published his second book, titled offne Ferne (open distance). Reviewed by Werner Reichhold
Jane Reichhold: Ten Years Haikujane. 84 Seiten. AHA Books, 2008. ISBN 978-0-944676-45-5 $12. postpaid in USA oder via E_Mail: jane@ahapoetry.com
in the dark
every new leaf Reviewed by Gerd Börner
Modern English Tanka Press Launches Atlas Poetica : A Journal of
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