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BOOK REVIEWS
Jane Reichhold
Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku by John Barlow and Matthew Paul. Foreword by Stephen Moss. Hardcover with a full-color dust jacket, 5 x 7.5 inches, 320 pages, black and white illustrations of birds, £15.99. Snapshot Press, Liverpool, England.
What an interesting way of presenting haiku! The editors John Barlow and Matthew Paul have listed the various species of birds and then alphabetically arranged their common and Latin names with one kind to a page. Below this information are the haiku. Sometimes there is only one and in other cases the poems continue on an additional page. The new innovation, and a welcomed one at that, is having an anthology of haiku without the names of the authors adding another line. Instead the authors’ names are finely printed in the footer. Thus a reader can go through reading the poems and only when one really stands out does the eyes have to drop all the way to the bottom of the page and there is revealed the author.
For the birder looking for more information of any bird, there are indices in the back of the book offering all the additional information a birder or poet would need. Thirty-four authors took part in the project and without exception all are writing very high quality haiku. The poems are printed in lower case with a minimum of punctuation so they look as modern as they sound. I suspect Barlow and Paul spent a great deal of time working with the authors because no other anthology I have seen in recent years offers such a consistently high quality of poems.
summery night
a cuckoo measures it
with three or four calls
David Cobb
frosting grass
tawny owl calls
deep in the oak
John Barlow
and then forming a great leap / link comes David Platt’s haiku
in the silence
between the owl’s cries
the dust on the desk
Whether you are a birder or not, or just want to read a lot of excellent haiku, get Wing Beats from Snapshot Press. Your next problem is to decide on which shelf to put it.
Wind Flow edited by Raffael de Gruttola, Judson Evans and Karen Klein with sumi-e artwork and cover by Kaji Aso. Perfectbound, 5.5 x 7.5 inches, 68 pages, no price.
Wind Flow is an anthology of the works by twenty-two members of the Boston Haiku Society that offers a goodly number of haiku, a few tanka, a couple of haibun, a renga and some haiga. Writing this review just after reviewing Wing Beats, I could not help noticing how uneven the selection of haiku in Wind Flow really are. Perhaps de Gruttola did not have the freedom to reject or request rewrites in an anthology by his group as the Brits did with the concept for their book.
In Wind Flow the haiku by one author are together on a page so the reader can get a good sampling of each person’s achievements with the form. This makes it fairly easy to spot the better writers and to see where those who deviate from the standards fall. The three haiga were less than thrilling even though they were printed in color. The 20 link renga also had its outstanding verses sprinkled among some very ordinary concepts.
The Boston Haiku Society has been meeting for 21 years at the Kaji Aso Studio in Boston on the third Saturday of the month. There 8 – 12 poets bring their work for discussion and workshopping. Once a month, the works are published in the BHS Newsletter which is sent to friends and members.
Stone Leeks: More Haiku Stories by Ken Jones. Pilgrim Press, perfect bound, 5.5 x 7.5 inches, 96 pages, pen-and-ink illustrations by Noragh Jones, price: E10. or $15 through Welsh Books Council website: www.gwales.com or UK orders £7.00 post-free with checks to K. Jones from Troedrhiwsebon, Cwmrheidol, Aberystwyth, Wales, SY23 3NB.
I liked this book. I like the idea of giving haibun an English name – haiku stories. I liked the variety and scope of the stories. I liked the pacing of the pieces and the sections of haiku that close each of the divisions. The haiku are excellent! I love the range of emotions these stories gave me – from the dark humor of “Wear your Catheter with Pride!” to the touching “Marsh’s Pool” that is so full of human kindness. I could have done without the caps in the haiku, but that is a small grumble next to the mountain of praise I have for this book.
Frankly I usually do not like haibun very much. Too often, even here in Lynx, the prose parts are, for my feeling, too short – saying too little and saying it so simply the reader is not grabbed by the optic nerve and hauled into the story a tingle with anticipation. Ken Jones is a natural-born (so it seems) story teller and he uses every trick and technique to its best advantage to bring the reader, panting and eager, to the torque points of haiku.
I do like it when stories start with a haiku and have more than just one haiku after the last period. The haiku in Stones Leeks (also a great title) could stand on their own, but also are so well built and integrated into the story that they at once sum it up and advance the plot in new and exciting ways.
As Jim Kacian writes in the Foreword: “No one works harder to champion haibun than Ken Jones.” Too often the person who works to get other’s work published is not the best writer himself, but in Ken Jones case, he is a natural leader and his work is worthy of being imitated.
If you, dear reader, are thinking of writing more haiku stories yourself, this is one book you should buy to study and to emulate. While you are sending in that order, add Ken Jones previous books: Arrow of Stones, Stallion’s Craig and The Parsley Bed.
Lilacs After Winter: Haibun by Francis Masat. Modern English Tanka Press, PO Box 43717, Baltimore Maryland 21236. Saddle-stapled, 22 pages, 13 haibun, US$8.95, www.modernenglishtankapress.com
The haibun in Lilacs After Winter form an arc between an aging man and his mother’s last days and funeral. It is touching that a son performs these rituals with such grace and feeling and is able to also bring readers the bare bones of the stories and very well written haiku. I liked the idea of adding a line or a quote above the titles to add another dimension to the creation of the story line. To me, this seems to be an idea that others might use. It helps to pull the unusual (to many) idea of haibun into the line-up of English literature. It is an additional work to find just the right quote to widen the scope of the piece, but Masat made it seem effortless and yet be so right. Kudos to him for this.
I realize that many of the modern haibun are written in the brief and succinct style that Masat uses, and uses well, but it is perhaps my failing that I cannot really get up a true admiration for this. I want more. I want the swing of the narrative to be closer to sudden fiction – to grab me by my emotions and kick my feet out from under me.
This is not a lack in Masat’s work that keeps me from appreciating it as much as many others may do. Maybe the best way to solve this is for you the reader to order the book, read it, and see what you think. Prove me wrong.
Casa Bunjcjj – Grandma’s House. Haiku in Romanian and English by Constantin Stroe. Published by the Societatea Scritorilor Militari. Preface by Vasile Moldovan.
The haiku are arranged two to a page with the Romanian version above the English rendition. In the middle of each page is repeated a stylized line drawing of an old-fashioned quill pen in an ink pot. With the heavy frames around each page, the haiku are automatically reduced to snapshots of a previous century.
Stars flickering –
the apple buds,
alive candles
as well as:
Late snowfall –
on the apple branches
the first blossoms
or
Fortune smiles on it:
a stalk of grass
among the ruins
Mr. Constantin Stroe was born in Buchaest on May 27th, 1950. He made his literary debut in 2004 with the poetry book, It is Snowing with Angels and in 2008 he also published a poetry book, At the Beginning was Love. He is a member of the Romanian Haiku’s Society.
Everlasting River: 100 tanka by Hiroshi Takeyama, translated by Aya Yuhki. Perfect bound, 5 x 7 inches, 156 pages, kanji, romaji and English with one poem per page. Translation notes and Prologue by Ernesto Kahan.
Hiroshi Takeyama was in a hospital being treated for a lung hemorrhage and only 1,400 meters from the impact of the Atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki in August 9, 1945. Though he lived, he watched his brother die from burns where he was laid in a grove of trees among the dead and dying. From the terror of this atrocious bombing, Hiroshi wrote over 3000 tanka poems describing the event and imbued with his plea for world peace. This book was titled also Everlasting River. Out of these 3000 poems Aya Yuhki chose a mere 100 to translate into English.
The graphic nature of the narrative of these poems makes them hard to read. They are even harder to read, and to accept the visual images called up by the spare words, when one knows that it was our nation that almost casually inflicted such horror on a people. If one is realistic, one has to multiply these 100 poems by the hundreds of thousands of persons who also have suffered such horrors due to military decisions made by our elected leaders that continue to happen right up until minutes ago in some land somewhere on the planet.
While it seems one person cannot make such war machines be still, yet Hiroshi Takeyama, and Aya Yuhki are doing their best to further world peace just one poem at a time. Blessings on them for courage and will.
Streetlights: Poetry of Urban Life in Modern English Tanka, anthology edited by McClintock & Garrison, Published by Modern English Tanka Press. Please contact Michael McClintock by e-mail at MchlMcClintock@aol.com. Publisher information at: www.modernenglishtankapress.com.This book is available from www.Lulu.com/modernenglishtanka and from the publisher. Complete information and mail/email order forms are available online at www.modernenglishtankapress.com. Price: $24.95 USD. ISBN 978-1-935398-04-2. Trade paperback. 264 pages, 6 x 9 inches.
This is the fourth in a series of tanka poetry anthologies from these editors. The editors of Streetlights and its companion anthology, Landfall (2007), have previously published two related anthologies dealing with sets and sequences of tanka poems: The Five-Hole Flute and The Dreaming Room. These new wave tanka anthologies are breaking new ground in English short verse at the same time that they are carrying forward the oldest continuous poetic tradition on earth, that of waka/tanka.
Streetlights goes beyond the customary polemics of "urban hell" literature to convey the human dimensions of life in the city, town, and suburban "forest"—the tones, moods, attitudes and emotional velocities of the present day . . . The poems found here weave into their lyrics the places and things of modern city life—its harmonies and dissonance, its quiet sanctuaries and noisy intersections, its headlines, politics, popular culture, and enduring issues about who we are and where we might be going . . . Fully exhibiting the power and range of the tanka as a short poem in English, here are song and image that may stand beside the great urban poetry of Whitman and Hart Crane, Carl Sandburg and Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance and the Beat Generation.
—Michael McClintock, from "A Short Preface for Streetlights"
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BOOK REVIEWS
Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku by John Barlow and Matthew Paul. Foreword by Stephen Moss. Hardcover with a full-color dust jacket, 5 x 7.5 inches, 320 pages, black and white illustrations of birds, £15.99. Snapshot Press, Liverpool, England.
Wind Flow edited by Raffael de Gruttola, Judson Evans and Karen Klein with sumi-e artwork and cover by Kaji Aso. Perfectbound, 5.5 x 7.5 inches, 68 pages, no price.
Stone Leeks: More Haiku Stories by Ken Jones. Pilgrim Press, perfect bound, 5.5 x 7.5 inches, 96 pages, pen-and-ink illustrations by Noragh Jones, price: E10. or $15 through Welsh Books Council website: www.gwales.com or UK orders £7.00 post-free with checks to K. Jones from Troedrhiwsebon, Cwmrheidol, Aberystwyth, Wales, SY23 3NB.
Lilacs After Winter: Haibun by Francis Masat. Modern English Tanka Press, PO Box 43717, Baltimore Maryland 21236. Saddle-stapled, 22 pages, 13 haibun, US$8.95, www.modernenglishtankapress.com
Casa Bunjcjj – Grandma’s House. Haiku in Romanian and English by Constantin Stroe. Published by the Societatea Scritorilor Militari. Preface by Vasile Moldovan.
Everlasting River: 100 tanka by Hiroshi Takeyama, translated by Aya Yuhki. Perfect bound, 5 x 7 inches, 156 pages, kanji, romaji and English with one poem per page. Translation notes and Prologue by Ernesto Kahan.
Streetlights: Poetry of Urban Life in Modern English Tanka, anthology edited by McClintock & Garrison, Published by Modern English Tanka Press. Please contact Michael McClintock by e-mail at MchlMcClintock@aol.com. Publisher information at: www.modernenglishtankapress.com. This book is available from www.Lulu.com/modernenglishtanka and from the publisher. Complete information and mail/email order forms are available online at www.modernenglishtankapress.com.
Price: $24.95 USD. ISBN 978-1-935398-04-2. Trade paperback. 264 pages, 6 x 9 inches.
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