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Books in Review
Householders: The Reizei Family in Japanese History. Steven D. Carter. Harvard University Press in Cambridge MA and London: 2007. Hardcover, 515 pages, ISBN:-13:978-0-674-01453-3. $55.
Reviewed by Jane Reichhold
a wattle seedpod: haiku by Lorin Ford. Tenerife: Post Pressed, 2008. Perfect bound with full color glossy cover, 5.5 x 5.5 inches, 32 pages, ISBN: 978-1921214-34-9. Cover designed by Ron Moss.
Reviewed by Jane Reichhold
Empty Gardenby Beverley George. Pearl Beach, NSW, Australia: Yellow Moon, 2006. ISBN: 0-9578831-6-1. Perfect Bound, 4 x 7 inches, 42 pp. $18 US, $19 AU.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward
Basho: The Complete Haiku. Translated with an introduction by Jane Reichhold. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2008. ISBN: 978-4-7700-3063-4. Casebound, 6 x 9 inches, 432 pp. $24.95 US.
Reviewed by
Bill Kenney and C.W. Hawes
Inca un pas – One more step: Haiku Vol. V. Stefan G. Theodoru. Bucuresti: S.C. Amurg Sentimental, 2008. Perfect bound, 8.5 x 5.5 inches, 158. Haiku in Romanian and English.
Reviewed by Jane Reichhold
Cicada Forest by Mariko Kitakubo. Translated by Amelia Fielden. Published by Kadokawa Gakugei Shuppan Ltd. 5-25-5 Hongo Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033 Japan. Price of book $15.
Reviewed by Giselle Maya
Quartet: a string of haibun in four voices by Jeffrey Harpeng, Patricia Prime, Diana Webb and Jeffrey Woodward. Teneriffe, Queensland, Australia: Post Pressed, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-921214-29-5. Saddle-stiched, 5 ½” x 8”, 24 pp, $7.00 AUD.
Reviewed by Joanna Preston
The Taste of Nashi: New Zealand Haiku. Edited by Nora Borrell and Katherine P. Butterworth. Wellington, NZ: Windrift, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-473-13300-9. Perfect Bound, 5 x 8 inches, 128 pp., $25 NZ.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward
Umbre in Lumina – Shades in Light. Anthology of Haibun. Editors: Magdalena Dale, Ana Ruse and Laura Vaceanu. Constanta, Romania: Editura Boldas, 2007. Perfect bound 8.5 x 5.5 inches, 96 pages, ISBN: 978-973-88626-4-7. Haibun in Romanian and English.
Reviewed by Jane Reichhold
The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan by Gustav Heldt http://www.
virginia.edu/
deallc/news.html
Reviewed by Gabi Greeve |
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Householders: The Reizei Family in Japanese History. Steven D. Carter. Harvard University Press in Cambridge MA and London: 2007. Hardcover, 515 pages, ISBN:-13:978-0-674-01453-3. $55.
Reviewed by Jane Reichhold
At the beginning of my journey through the 515 pages of Householders: The Reizei (rhymes with “crazy”) Family in Japanese History I was furious with Steven D. Carter who I had so greatly admired for his work, Traditional Japanese Poetry, and what he did to bring a greater understanding of tanka to English poets. I simply could not understand why in Householders, in the face of all reason, he would chop up and destroy the form of tanka as it is now written in English. Having to find a method of indicating the five phrases of a Japanese poem since these phrases get lost in most translation, the current plan is to place the words on five lines.
But in Householders, Carter uses this strange arrangement:
Written on the first day of spring
On spring’s first morning I look out
across the fields of Ashita Moor –
to where on this very day the mists begin
to rise.
Minamoto no Toshiyori
The phrasing of the translation is correct and the poem would look like a regular tanka if the spaces were made into line breaks as:
On spring’s first morning
I look out across the fields
of Ashita Moor –
to where on this very day
the mists begin to rise.
Instead, every poem in the book has this uncommon arrangement except Akiko Yosano’s poem:
Must you lecture me?
Must you expound your way?
Enlighten me?
Put your karma away now –
I offer you hot blood.
Slowly, as the hundreds of pages were turned, I realized that the Reizei family wants all of “their” poems to look different from the rest. That could also explain why Carter would continue to use the term “uta” (meaning song; the original name for waka or tanka) when even the titles of anthologies were calling the poems “waka.” Just as the Imperial Household still calls their tanka “waka” to differentiate from the “common” sort of poems, so the Reizei want to call their poems “uta” even when the term has ceased to stand for the tanka. (Aside: one of the reasons for changing the name from waka to tanka was because “waka” came to mean “poetry” and Shiki thought the genre needed a specific name.)
Okay, who is this family and why is there this book about them? They trace their family back to the greats of Japanese poetry, Shunzei, Teika, and Tameie and the name came about only as the Nun Abutsu, the second wife of Tameie, fought to have her sons inherit the library and teachings of this family of poets. She succeeded and the family took their name from the street in Kyoto where they lived.
From generation to generation the goal of one male (as long as they had them) was to protect and increase the library and sacred objects, work their way up as high as possible in the imperial court by serving as stewards of poetry contests, rituals, and education. Even when the court was reduced to a powerless figurehead by the military rule from Kamakura, the Reizei family managed to maintain their influence and keep a roof over their heads by various means during wars and attempted takeovers of the government.
Even in the best of times though, the family was not able to advance very high in the hierarchy of either government or poetry as they clung ever more tightly to their little bit of fame and influence. These years after 1100 brought the decline of waka as renga poets took that form to its greatest popularity until the haiku took over. Through it all the Reizei family functioned as if they alone had password and keys to true poetry. The heads of the family wrote countless poems that were to be the model of elegance and restraint. Finally they realized that they were educators and not poets so they changed their philosophy, in the last century to strive for “excellence in mediocrity.”
Credit does go to Mr. Carter for his efforts to make the history interesting. I was fascinated to review the history of Japan as seen from one viewpoint. Still it was often very hard to keep the narrative in mind as the Reizei family, perhaps as a result of disliking innovation in poetry also, named all their males with the prefix “Tame-.” The result, when telling of an incident when three generations were alive, was confusing and therefore mind-numbing. Still Carter made valiant efforts to fill out the characters to move the action and to tell the story.
For poets looking for examples for writing tanka this would not be a book worth the many dollars of its price. The only tanka in the book that had the smallest spark of life were those by Shotetsu and here were so few the poet would be wiser to get Carter’s translation of his works in Unforgotten Dreams. I say that in spite of my dislike in that book because there the line crime is even worse – Carter forms the tanka into ten lines. Thank goodness directly under each poem is the romaji and here the five “lines” are indicated with slashes so the alert tanka writer can validate the form.
Hidden within the book Householders is a marvelous story waiting to be told – the complete account of how it was and is the women who best managed the legend of the Reizei. Their bravery, their rational thinking and behavior and their sacrifices are stories that cry out to be told. When there were no more male heirs, fathers forced daughters to marry the man best able to manage and foster the family library. Living Reizei women are witnesses to this sad fact. There is human drama in the book but it simmers below the surface under the depressing and oppressing sameness of Reizei poetry.
a wattle seedpod: haiku by Lorin Ford. Tenerife: Post Pressed, 2008. Perfect bound with full color glossy cover, 5.5 x 5.5 inches, 32 pages, ISBN: 978-1921214-34-9. Cover designed by Ron Moss.
Reviewed by Jane Reichhold
This first collection of the Victoria, Australia poet, Lorin Ford is beautifully done. It is a little book; just a handful but due to careful placement the one to three poems per page the reader is filled with delight. Delight is what this book is out to bring. Ford has a delightful sense of humor that is perfect for haiku. She is not sarcastic or scathing as is much of the humor in haiku, but her gentle life-affirming view of the world allows her to find her inspiration in the cracks of the world. Two of my favorites:
street café –
sparrows wait
on the tables
flooded road
a soft drink bottle
turns left
Many of the haiku reference typical Australian flora and fauna and there were terms used that I could only guess at their meaning. Example:
parked utes –
kelpie ears point
to the pub
Who would have thought I would need a glossary for this book, but the need only proves that Lorin Ford has fulfilled the haiku requirement of writing carefully and accurately of the life around her.
Lorin Ford won first place in the sixth and seventh annual Paper Wasp anthologies of the Jack Stamm Awards, as well as first place in the Shiki Salon Annual Haiku Poets’ Choice in 2005. Her work has been widely published in and beyond Australia.
Empty Gardenby Beverley George. Pearl Beach, NSW, Australia: Yellow Moon, 2006. ISBN: 0-9578831-6-1. Perfect Bound, 4 x 7 inches, 42 pp. $18 US, $19 AU.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward
Beverley George, influential editor of first Yellow Moon and now Eucalypt,
presents sixty-odd individual poems and less than a half dozen sequences in this, her first tanka collection. The book is very slender but George’s work is carefully selected and closely crafted. Her successful tanka easily outnumber her misses.
Michael McClintock, in his preface to Empty Garden, remarks that the poet’s “study of Heian court poetry and subsequent high regard for it are amply reflected throughout . . . .” The accuracy of his characterization can be most easily verified in noting the prominence of love motifs, not unlike what one finds in Ono no Komachi, Izumi Shikibu or Princess Shikishi, and with the same emphasis in their relation, the world of longing and of love unfulfilled or lost being more fruitful for lyricism than love conquered or realized.
green oranges
among glossy leaves
another day with you
not living up
to expectations
combing through seaweed
for an unbroken shell –
once my long hair
spilling over us
shut out the fire’s light
These tanka exhibit George’s ready trust in the sensate as adequate symbol to convey her meaning – fruit that has not ripened, a beach littered with broken shells, tokens of anticipation defeated and of an amorous past too distant in memory to retain real substance.
roadside grass –
two blackbirds rise
then settle
and I am surprised
by longing
The poet does not need to identify the point of her desire as the attentive reader will meet it again and again:
why is your voice
impossible to recall?
the apricot tree
you planted in our youth
still fruits every year
She longs for what is irrevocably absent and, because it has been far removed for so very long, finds herself incredulous to discover this passion may yet live without its object.
These are graceful and sensitive poems, by any standard, and imbued with a quiet confidence and humility. George rarely overreaches but no poet is without some shortcoming:
your childhood home –
let my foot fall softly here
and pause
in all those unmarked spaces
that gave shape to your life
The sentiment of “unmarked spaces” is too precious and the reverence of “let my foot fall softly” is affected.
Such miscues are uncommon, however, and George makes the reviewer’s task remarkably pleasant. Praise is more palatable than scorn for critic and author alike and George offers much to praise. Let me close, then, on an approving note with the last tanka of Empty Garden, a poem that revisits George’s leitmotif one final time:
how can I explain
what life is like
without you?
my heart does not believe
that you are gone
Basho: The Complete Haiku. Translated with an introduction by Jane Reichhold. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2008. ISBN: 978-4-7700-3063-4. Casebound, 6 x 9 inches, 432 pp. $24.95 US.
Reviewed by Bill Kenney
The poet Basho (born Matsuo Kinsaku in Iga Province, Japan, in 1644) is widely regarded as the founding father of haiku as we have come to know it. It was Basho who brought to the haikai, as much pastime as poetry, of the Japanese merchant class and samurai the high seriousness of true art. High seriousness, we must remember, is not solemnity; lightness is one of the defining qualities of Basho's best poems and a key point of his aesthetic.
Now, in "Basho: The Complete Haiku," we have for the first time a translation into English of all 1012 of Basho's haiku. Jane Reichhold, an accomplished haiku poet and the author of the highly influential "Writing and Enjoying Haiku: A Hands-On Guide," has been a Basho enthusiast since she first encountered his work, an encounter that set her on her own haiku path. If her translation is a labor of love, it is also a work of dedicated scholarship and poetic sensibility. In Reichhold, the most famous Japanese poet of all time has found his translator for our time.
In addition to the poetic translations themselves, the book includes, under the heading of "Notes," the original Japanese poems, Romanized versions, literal word-for-word translations, and commentaries that are unfailingly informative and frequently illuminating.
In the back matter, Reichhold provides a chronology of the poet's life, a bibliography of Basho in English, and an index of first lines. All of these are useful, but among the book's most valuable features are a glossary of literary terms (which may also serve for some as an introduction to the spirit of haiku) and an enumeration with examples of 33 haiku techniques employed by the master. This last lends insight into Basho's work and guidance to those who, inspired as Reichhold was by that work, may want to set out on their own haiku path.
Ultimately, of course, it's the translations that count, and here Reichhold shows the sure hand of a contemporary poet who is deeply in tune the spirit of the originals. Just a sampling:
old pond
a frog jumps into
the sound of water
autumn deepens
so what does he do
the man next door
morning dew
the muddy melon stained
with coolness
For anyone seriously interested in haiku, as reader or writer or both, "Basho: The Complete Haiku" will be required reading and rereading.
(Both of these reviews are on the Amazon.com site)
Reviewed also by C.W. Hawes
Ever since I first discovered Basho, some forty-plus years ago in a seventh grade English class, I have been influenced by the seeming simplicity and power of his poetry. But a complete collection of his haiku did not exist in English and I had to make do with the various partial collections which surfaced now and again.
Now, at long last, thanks to Jane Reichhold and Kodansha International, we have all of Basho's haiku in English. Basho: The Complete Haiku is a literary tour de force which every lover of haiku, poetry, and Basho needs to have on his or her bookshelf.
The book itself is beautifully done with the artwork of Shiro Tsujimura. Subtle and subdued, the illustrations please and tantalize the eye. Offering a wonderful visual counterpoint to the poems themselves.
Reichhold, a haiku poet in her own right, has been on the English haiku scene from the beginning. Her understanding of the form is second to none and she stands amongst the best of English-language haikuists. What better tribute to a poet than for another to translate his work?
Reichhold's labor of love enriches us all. In Basho: The Complete Haiku, we learn of Basho's life, what were the possible influences upon him, and how he in turn influenced others. We gain an understanding of his literary techniques, as Reichhold presents us with an appendix of analysis. A glossary of important terms is also provided. Then, of course, there are the poems.
Basho's haiku are presented in two sections: the main section, which are the superb translations; a second which gives the Japanese, a literal rendering into English, and explanatory notes. The translations themselves are spare, clean, yet full of life. The translator has clearly been touched by the spirit of her mentor. The literal renderings and notes provide the reader an opportunity to go deeper into the poem for an even richer experience of nuanced meanings. This addition gives the book greater depth.
My heartfelt thanks goes out to Jane Reichhold for translating the work of Basho and to Kodansha International for bringing the work to the world. We non-Japanese readers can now savor the full range of haiku of one of the truly great poets and philosophers. I cannot help but think the spirit of Matsuo Basho is smiling and filled with great joy.
Inca un pas – One more step: Haiku Vol. V. Stefan G. Theodoru. Bucuresti: S.C. Amurg Sentimental, 2008. Perfect bound, 8.5 x 5.5 inches, 158. Haiku in Romanian and English.
Reviewed by Jane Reichhold
These haiku, one to a page in Romanian and English, follow the Japanese tradition of starting a book of haiku with spring. In Romania, at least in this book, the first spring poem is set in May. Each season section is defined by a drawing by Nina Theodoru. Purists may take issue with the pixelation, but for me it added softness to the line drawings. This is another book that makes a valiant effort to gain English readers and then, sadly, with an error in the first word of the first haiku is bound to turn them off to reading the rest of the poems. Also, my Romanian comes to me over Latin and French which is a minefield, but I felt the translation would have been better if it had stuck closer to the original poem. Please do not misunderstand me; I am delighted when I get a book of poems published in the original language in which the author has made the extreme effort to put the poem into another language. I know how much work that is, and how hard it is. But if that much work is added to the work of writing the poems, then one more step is needed – having the manuscript proofed by a native of the target language.
Disregarding my comments above, I hope the reader will find poems to admire and enjoy as I did these:
Foggy day break
Small silhouettes on way to school
thin voices
Undecided bumblebee
circles above two flowers –
scarce raindrops
Cicada Forest by Mariko Kitakubo. Translated by Amelia Fielden. Published by Kadokawa Gakugei Shuppan Ltd. 5-25-5 Hongo Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033 Japan. Price of book $15.
Reviewed by Giselle Maya
The book Cicada Forest has an elegant cover designed by Yoko Hasegawa, with a preface by Michael McClintock.
The entire book is a delight to read. First, there is “New Writing” with four sections in which the reader is introduced to the poet’s life through her lyrical and sparse approach to tanka writing. Glimpses of her life are revealed, always with great finesse and restraint: the reader will discover unique and memorable tanka. The sensitive translations by Amelia Fielden make each word count, with her light touch.
I feel the plight
of endangered creatures
on this planet,
like they’re looking at me
with my child’s eyes
Kitakubo’s love of the earth and our universe is expressed in poems such as:
the sky dissolves
and is flooded with rain
prostrating myself
I press my lips
to the soaked plain
A sense of the vastness of our space for living and moving is accentuated by her writing about wings. The theme of wings is woven through the entire book, creating a feeling of the ancient desire of Icarus for flight and transcendence, the possibility of a scintillating dance in space and time.
oh give me wings
for my back,
shining wings
which seek
only virtue
How exhilarating this feels! And expressed as a tanka it is simply inspiring.
The entire collection of Mariko Kitakubo’s tanka, spanning the years from
1999 to the present time is her journey as woman, mother,and poet. Her family relationships become apparent; countries, seasons, mindscapes and seascapes, life and death touch the reader’s sensibility. Both a vastness and a microscopic focusing on detail are crafted into these tanka. Especially skillful are the poems relating to the raising of her son. Wistful, ringing true to me a mother of a son and daughter, she explores in a gentle manner with sentiments which have not yet been the subject matter of tanka so far.
Maintaining a comfortable distance, Mariko explores the presence in her life of her young son:
twenty years ago
separating
from me
certain cells became
a charming male
seeing you off
suddenly I recollect
the day you were born
now in mid-winter
there’s the Orion star
onto my withered heart
falls a small star
with you
I share
a single tomato
There is a melding of human experience with nature: a Shinto sense of a unifying principle where one touches the earth with reverence and gratitude.
in the midst
of this rain
they appear,
the mountain god and
the god of the stream
beside a quiet man
sea birds
one after another
dropping from the sky
like sacred messages
These are tanka jewels rising from the pages of Cicada Forest and waiting to be sung and interpreted by a graceful dancer.
On the far side of the spectrum are a few poems which explore darker human experiences, what Mariko so aptly calls “the desolation of Descartes” No permanent peace and serenity have been attained by human beings and there will be times of pain.
cutting my foot
on a tree-root
I felt
the desolation of Descartes
slowly slide into me
And yet, the entire book radiates confidence in the human species and its endeavors and one feels encouraged to continue one’s life-work.
I have no way
of being really sure
about things,
yet my nails are growing
so confidently
Quartet: a string of haibun in four voices by Jeffrey Harpeng, Patricia Prime, Diana Webb and Jeffrey Woodward. Teneriffe, Queensland, Australia: Post Pressed, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-921214-29-5. Saddle-stiched, 5 ½” x 8”, 24 pp, $7.00 AUD.
Reviewed by Joanna Preston
In late 2007, Australian haiku poet Jeffrey Harpeng came up with an idea for a haibun collaboration. Echoing Octavio Paz’s 1969 Renga (written over five days in collaboration with Edoardo Sanguineti, Charles Tomlinson and Jacques Roubaud), his aim was:
to compose a renga/haibun sequence where each writers’ link is, say six lines of prose plus a renga link - three & two lines alternating as per a renga sequence ...[and] to get each writer to reflect the state of the world through local issues and changes ...
The four poets involved were Jeffrey Harpeng (Australia), Patricia Prime (New Zealand), Diana Webb (England) and Jeffrey Woodward (USA).
Now the disclaimer. I’m in the odd position of having been initially sounded out for this project, so I have both a personal link, and access to background information. Hence this review is less “critical analysis of merits” and more “commentary on project”.
I’ve thought for a while that haibun was the most exciting form of poetry currently being written in English, and Quartet promised to explore some of those possibilities. How do you link one haibun to the next? How closely, how tenuously? What is the cumulative effect of these links? How would the four different poets play off their differences (of gender, of style and of nation)? Would the piece work as a whole? Become a single poem? Or remain an anthology of 36?
I really enjoyed this book. Virtually all of the haibun and haiku are of a high standard. What did surprise me though was how similar in level and mood the pieces generally were. Despite the original intention, the differences between the four voices were smoothed out rather than emphasised – maybe inevitable, given the nature of linking (trying to echo or resonate with an earlier poem) and the speed with which the book was written. Heightened by the fact that the four poets did not restrict their settings to their own countries – for example, some of Jeff Harpeng’s were set in New Zealand, and Jeffrey Woodward has pieces that are quite European (such as Picnic on the Grass) and frankly British (Garden Party). But many of the pieces from all four are not firmly located anywhere, which I think is, at the very least, a missed opportunity.
Stylistically, the haibun are mostly of the ‘short chunk of descriptive or narrative prose, concluded by one haiku’ type. Of the exceptions, two haibun begin with a haiku (Peace and Plenty and Marked), one (Concert in the Park) uses two haiku and one (Dead Letter Office) no haiku at all. (A fact which I missed in my first few readings – some evidence for Janice Bostok and Ken Jones’ contention that haibun doesn’t always have to contain a haiku?) In some cases, there’s a sporadic sense of one or other of the poets having an overarching story behind their links – again, something that would have been interesting to see explored a bit more consciously. (Haibun #1 & #5, #7 & #24, for those who want to check.)
There are a couple of things that recur frequently. Spiders and their webs turn up in 5 of the 36 haibun. Ditto butterflies. (Interestingly, not more than once in any one haibun.) Painting turns up in 6 (or 7, if you include “sketching”). But by far the biggest obsession here is children – they occur explicitly in 10 of the 36 poems, and are implied in many others. Children in parks, at museums, following parades. But most often grandchildren.
The links between the different pieces are sometimes subject matter (e.g. turtles, between #1 and #2), sometimes physical setting e.g. (rivers and boulders linking #32 and #33), emotional connotation (e.g. being trapped: an ex-con, trapped by a broken floorboard in #29, two nuns (and a spider) in #30), or reference to a specific word (e.g. “curtain” in both #15 and #16, “cloud” in #16 and #17.)
They’re of varying strength – sometimes close, sometimes very loose. (Not just between haibun and haibun, but also between prose and haiku.) I tend to think of them as step, stride and leap – step being only a small movement away from the previous piece (essentially ‘more of the same’ or ‘adding detail’), leap being a big change (often one that you have to puzzle out after the fact) and stride being somewhere in between (the sort of link that hits you a moment or two after you first frown and say “but...”) For those with analytical minds, my reading breaks the links down into 2 steps, 5 strides and 29 leaps.
Some of the leaps are wonderful – Patricia Prime’s Lovebirds linked to Jeffrey Woodward’s Garden Party by references to gardens and courtship, with a third link between Prime’s haiku (“gulls quibble”) and the characters (gossiping women) of Woodward’s prose. Or between Woodward’s A Dry Music (about watching a rattlesnake shedding its skin) and Prime’s Pieces of Sky (discovering a snail and thinking about a grandchild). It takes a moment before the links reveal themselves here – not just the natural setting, or the presence of a human watcher, or even the focus on a crawling animal (snake, and snail - maybe even young grandson?) but actual shared words: “diamond”, “rattle” and “cracks”. Lovely stuff.
All things considered, this really is an exciting book. Its failings seem to me to be mainly to do with opportunities missed. I would have liked to see the participants each establishing a specific ‘voice’ for their links, making more of the differences between each of the four people involved. Claiming images, moods, locations, types of link etc as their own. Thinking more about the meta-structure of the collaboration as a whole, and writing or revising to best serve that.
English language haibun is strong, inventive and endlessly flexible. An entire area of possibility has been opened up by this quartet of poets. Now it’s up to the rest of us to carry it forward.
The Taste of Nashi: New Zealand Haiku. Edited by Nora Borrell and Katherine P. Butterworth. Wellington, NZ: Windrift, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-473-13300-9. Perfect Bound, 5 x 8 inches, 128 pp., $25 NZ.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Woodward
The editors inform the public, in their preface, that the current collection – 200 plus haiku by 60 New Zealand poets – represents a distillation of the one thousand haiku that they received as a result of their open invitation. It might be safe to assume, therefore, that The Taste of Nashi accurately portrays the state of New Zealand haiku today.
Many of the poets will be familiar names to regular readers of haiku journals – Ernest J. Berry or Cyril Childs, for example – but the level of writing in this anthology, whether it comes from the hand of an established figure or from that of the lesser known, testifies to a fair degree of sophistication in New Zealand’s haikai community. The style may vary from the terse and spare
inside
the stone buddha
stone
Cyril Childs (17)
drying
In the rain
winter firewood
Catherine Mair (37)
Monday
pegging the wind
into our sheets
Greeba Brydges-Jones (62)
to one that is at once more expansive and hints that untold stories lie just below the surface:
still born calf –
the heifer’s tongue
rasps my face
Joanna Preston (69)
mending his fence –
the neighbour’s mouth
full of nails
Patricia Prime (103)
Just over 40 of the 60 contributors to this book are women, a fact which may or may not be of greater significance to haiku in New Zealand or haiku at large. Sandra Simpson of Tauranga is particularly impressive and original:
one egg
rattling in the pot
autumn rain (42)
standing naked
in moonlight –
the taste of nashi (65)
Specific atmosphere and emotive quality are evoked in each haiku – cool emptiness in the former, warm sensuality in the latter – but the treatment is so controlled and understated as to justify various rival interpretations. This is ambiguity in the positive sense.
The second haiku by Sandra Simpson illustrates a minor problem faced by contemporary haiku in English – regional vocabulary. Nashi, an Asian pear, is a fruit not widely known in North America or Europe, perhaps. That is not to argue that such vocabulary should be suppressed. Far from it. But it might be a useful editorial practice, when a collection is aimed at the English diaspora, to provide footnotes or a glossary of local terms. The reader’s reception of the following fine haiku is hampered for the same reason
one toheroa
over the limit
low winter moon
Ernest J. Berry (61)
Toheroa, that is, Amphidesma ventricosum, an edible saltwater clam: such information aids the North American, British or South African reader who is highly unlikely to meet toheroa in his local waters. An American writing of a saguaro or kachina similarly might wish to include a brief note for the New Zealander.
The Taste of Nashi is handsomely designed with a mint-green cover and decorated with kanji by a skilled calligrapher. It presents the New Zealand haiku community in a favorable light while convincingly demonstrating that haiku in English respects no national border.
fog-filled harbour
someone somewhere drives
a nail through it
Cyril Childs (69)
Umbre in Lumina – Shades in Light. Anthology of Haibun. Editors: Magdalena Dale, Ana Ruse and Laura Vaceanu. Constanta, Romania: Editura Boldas, 2007. Perfect bound 8.5 x 5.5 inches, 96 pages, ISBN: 978-973-88626-4-7. Haibun in Romanian and English.
Reviewed by Jane Reichhold
The title of this anthology is dramatized in the dark brown front cover of a stream flowing through an autumn scene. When you finish reading the thirty-three haibun and close the book the back cover has a photo of a forest with sunlight and leaves only beginning to become golden. I found this such a marvelous way to end the experience of the book.
Most of the thirty names of the authors are Romanian and several will be familiar to readers from their wins in contests in Japan and USA and their work published in magazines. Magdalena Dale, the head editor is known for her haiku and her tanka work which has been translated into English. Adina Enachescu has had several of her books reviewed here in Lynx. Vasile Moldovan has done so much to bring not only his work but that of other Romanians to the English-reading audience with haiku, tanka and renga. I was surprised to see the names of Angelee Deodhar, from India, Quendryth Young of Australia and Bruce Ross of USA included; each with one haibun.
First of all generous praise is won by the editors and translators for this book. It is very different translating a book with prose than one with the small bites of poetry and there is a lot of work here. As much as I admire the skills of these editors to be bilingual, it seems one of them would have known an English speaker well enough to ask for a proofing of the text. Next time maybe?
A few of the haibun are written or translated into readable English. I found the haibun by Zinovy Yayman, a pleasure to read. The haibun not written in Romanian – by Deodhar, Young and Ross –
opened themselves to my eye without the mind-twisting errors in the translations of the rest of the book.
The compiling of Umbre in Lumina – Shades in Light demonstrates that writers in Romania are very interested and even adept at this now popular form. It is good to get glimpses of their lives and to know what interests them as the reader is able to fill in the gaps in a narrative between the haiku. Still, no mater how much I read of haibun, I constantly have the feeling that the prose, and even other prose experiments, are not fulfilling the promise that haibun offers. I am looking for prose that uses the techniques of the poetry forms of tanka and haiku (and other forms) and not be being telegraphic brief as haiku were once crippled. I mean that when writing prose with haiku, the several methods of composing a haiku be used in prose. The tanka, with its greater scope, could, when combined with prose using tanka pivots, switches, subjectivity combined with observation mode could make meaningful changes in the way we view prose.
The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan by Gustav Heldt http://www.virginia.edu/deallc/news.html
Reviewed by Gabi Greeve
The Heian court of the late ninth and early tenth centuries represents one of the most innovative and influential periods in the history of Japanese poetry. It witnessed the creation of entirely new forms of verse in poetry matches, screen poems, and officially sponsored anthologies, none of which had a precedent in earlier times. At the apex of these phenomena lay compilation of the Kokin wakashū (Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern), whose status as the first imperial anthology of native poetry would make it integral to Japanese court culture for centuries afterward.
Despite the historical significance of this period's poetry, scholarship has tended to focus on the form and content of individual texts with little reference to the socio-political and ritual contexts in which they were produced and performed. Heldt's aim is to show how aspects of poetic praxis, particularly that of "harmonization" ( wa ) in verse, can offer new understandings of Heian poetry's textual, ritual, cosmological, social, and political dimensions.
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