Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

This, Ian Storr’s second, beautifully-titled collection of haiku (and haibun), has been a long time coming, 16 years in fact, since Seeds from a Larch Cone. Ian is my friend, and was my long-time colleague at Presence haiku journal – he was the managing editor from 2014, following the tragic death of Martin Lucas, until last year, a stint in which he undertook much more than the lion’s share of the work involved in cementing its reputation as one of English-language haiku’s best journals, if not the best.

I know I’m biased but I have no hesitation in saying that Late Light, published by Alba Publishing and available here (scroll down) is the most important collection of haiku by a British poet since (at least) Thomas Powell’s Clay Moon (Snapshot Press, 2020) and the two collections by our late Presence colleague Stuart Quine (Alba Publishing, 2018 and 2019).

Ian hails from Sheffield and still lives there. He spent his working life as a children’s social worker, an immensely important and difficult job. The compassion, objectivity, resilience and intelligence needed for that profession shines through in Ian’s haiku. Take this one for example:

March winds
our old men talk of compost
and plants for shade

I first read this as an allotment scene, with the ‘our’ being an affectionate determiner for two or more regulars sharing their years of knowledge and generally chewing the fat at the start of an implicitly cold spring. Then I thought perhaps it’s a memory, or after a photograph, of Ian and his wife’s (or someone else’s) fathers finding common ground (pun intended!). Either way (or maybe in another reading), it’s that subtle ‘our’ which surely raises this delicate and precise haiku beyond merely good.

The collection is sequenced, as Ian says in a brief preface, ‘to follow the progression of the seasons, starting and finishing with late winter/early spring’. I’ll cite three more poems to exemplify Ian’s ability.

three yards a day
the dry-stone waller’s answer
. . . dusk on the moor

Like Issa’s daikon radish-puller pointing the way with a daikon, this haiku has both a drollery and specific local context of its own. We might intuit the waller’s pride or maybe boredom at repeatedly being asked the same question by passersby. The crepuscular isolation of the scene undercuts the gentle humour, thereby adding another layer.

And how’s this for a classic British haiku:

day at the seaside
she buys a thicker sweater
in a summer sale

We’ve all been there: tolerating the unseasonal lack of warmth on the beach or as we stroll around the resort until we reach breaking-point. In this case, there seems every chance that the thicker clothing will lead to more stoicism of the ‘We’re here and we’re bloomin’ well going to enjoy it whether we like or not’ kind. We might also note the ironic, and slightly old-fashioned use of the word ‘sweater’, rather than ‘jumper’.

Finally, here’s one from, I sense, the point in October when British Summer Time ends:

shorter days
red admirals quiver
where the wild plums split

This is the sort of haiku which could easily be dismissed as a nature note, but it’s a classic autumn haiku: the butterflies by now probably a bit ragged around the edges, seeking sustenance where they can, here at the opened windfalls. The relentless annual cycle of the butterflies and the tree(s) inevitably remind us of our own mortality, the haiku’s active verb denoting transience.

The collection ends with a five-haiku sequence, ‘Martin Lucas at Bleasdale’, which, for those of us privileged to have known Martin, haiku/tanka poet, founding editor of Presence and much-missed friend, will be especially poignant to read. It’s Ian’s gift, though, to be able to make the specific universally resonant, which is what the best haiku do.

The fine haiku and haibun poet Sean O’Connor says in his introduction, ‘In these pages, we meet Ian Storr the writer, the poet, the person, with his unique and insightful perspective of the world as expressed through his outstanding and engaging writing.’ As respite from the warmongering, racist rhetoric and selfishness growing more prevalent today, Late Light is indispensable.