A fortnight today I’ll be 60, which seems ridiculous but such is life. Half a lifetime ago I wrote this (not especially brilliant) haiku, which was published in Blithe Spirit in 1997:
thirtieth birthday
yellowing pears
in a porcelain bowl
In Stepping Stones (British Haiku Society, 2007), a book of commentaries on English-language haiku by British poets, based on his doctoral work, Martin Lucas wrote of that haiku:
The internal comparison is rather obvious, but [. . .] there is a secondary appeal: the intrinsic beauty of the sill life, which we can dwell on for its own value.
As an introduction to the possibilities of haiku in English, it’s yet to be bettered, because Martin had such a gift for analysing haiku simply and concisely, in the spirit of the haiku themselves.
Of late, I’ve continued my fiction binge, including two novels very removed from haiku: Eleanor Catton’s first two, The Rehearsal (2008) and the Booker Prize-winning The Luminaries (2013); both brilliant, as you may well know – I’m very late to these parties! I can’t imagine two novels more different from one another, both immaculately plotted and intriguing. At 832 pages, The Luminaries must be the longest novel I’ve read since slogging my very reluctant way through Little Dorrit for A-level (an experience that pretty much put me off Dickens for life), but it flew by: a gripping tale of crime and double-crossing in the New Zealand gold rush of the 1860s. I have Catton’s third novel, Birnam Wood, to read too, but I’m saving that for a holiday.
Rumer Godden’s The Battle of the Villa Fiorita (1963) was a recommendation on the excellent Jacqui’s Wine Journal book blog, here, which my wife, Lyn, bought and loved; I loved it too, for all the reasons that Jacqui articulates and more. We must find and read more of Godden’s novels.
Lyn wasn’t keen on Han Kang’s famous The Vegetarian – about a woman who stops eating meat and is treated like an outcast for doing so, within a deeply patriarchal society – but I admired its construction and almost nihilistic tone. It’s a difficult read, but easier than the only other book of hers I’ve read, Human Acts, set during the Gwanju rebellion in 1980.
I’m currently reading The Undertaking, the debut novel by Audrey Magee – details here – having enjoyed her second one, The Colony, last year. It’s another fine novel, a real page-turner if ever there was one., despite its setting in Germany and on the Eastern Front in 1942-43. The contrasts between the home front and the Battle of Stalingrad are accentuated by Magee’s style of interweaving the two parallel narratives.
On the poetry front, I’ve reread Jackie Wills’ s latest collection, Making the Wedding Dress (Salt, available here, though you should ignore the misleading ‘synopsis’ that reads as if it’s been cobbled together by AI), because it’s book of the month (my recommendation) for the poetry book club I’m part of. It’s been a real pleasure to read it again, even though it’s not been long since I read it for the first time. It’s also led me to re-read Wills’s On Poetry (Smith Doorstop, 2022, available here), which contains lots of wise advice for the beginner and the more experienced poet alike, and incidentally also got me re-reading collections by the wonderful poet Catherine Smith for the first time in ages.
Despite all this reading, I’ve not written any new poems for a while now, and have just been tinkering revising, and often adding to, poems originally drafted way back when, in some cases yonks ago. That suits me fine. I find revisiting old poems, i.e. ones that have hitherto not quite worked for whatever reason in order, to see if they’re salvageable almost as enjoyable as editing newly drafted poems. Some poems of mine have been as reworked and battered about as sculpture maquettes, in attempts to elicit their true heart and point. Poems without heart and point aren’t worth persevering with, yet I’m a terrible one for hoarding drafts of poems that I know are never going anywhere, usually because there’s some line or phrase that I think might be recyclable. That said, I’ve inadvertently managed to delete many drafts over the years. For every poem I’ve written that I’m happy with, I would think there’s another 10 or 20 that didn’t cut the mustard – an eyewatering total, I should think. I may be older, with forty-four years of writing poems behind me, but dragging them into the light doesn’t necessarily get any easier.
Tonight sees the return to UK TV screens of 7 Up, in what appears to be its last ever instalment, 70 Up. It’s surely ITV’s finest-ever programme (maybe The Sweeney, Minder and Corrie run it close in their disparate ways!). Lyn and I finished re-watching it all up to 63 Up only a few days ago. It will be deeply moving, and a reminder that, even with promulgators of hatred on the loose in greater numbers in this country than at any other point during my lifetime, there is still so much that binds the ordinary, decent people together – and that everyone ordinary is also extraordinary in their own way.
Tag: haiku
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September
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On Ian Storr’s Late Light
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 shine 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 and loved 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.
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On another haiku by Simon Chard
the day’s gentle start lesser celandines
This is the winning haiku, and therefore featured, haiku for April on this year’s Haiku Calendar, still very much worth buying from Snapshot Press, here.
Longstanding readers of my blog will know that I believe Simon Chard is one of the very best English-language haiku poets writing today. This example of his work is deceptively simple. It’s written as a one-liner, but it consists of two almost equal-length parts:
the day’s gentle start
lesser celandines
But haiku written as two lines look a bit odd, don’t they?
It would also have been too awkward to have forced this haiku into three lines, because of that possessive apostrophe:
the day’s
gentle start
lesser celandines
Therefore, from the angle of appearance alone, Chard has undoubtedly made the right call in presenting this moment as a one-line haiku.
But what exactly is this moment? Well, for one thing, it’s really two moments – which presumably are so consecutive as to be all but conflated: the realisation that the (unseen) poet-persona’s day has got off to a gentle, and presumably good, start by way of, perhaps, a woodland walk, and then the noticing of the flowers.
Or, in fact, it could be that the noticing of the flowers preceded the thought and, moreover, triggered it; that the sight of the flowers has slowed the poet down, made him more fully in tune with time and place for a fraction of this spring morning (assuming that he hasn’t been abed until noon or gone!) and enabled him to ease himself into the day.
Either way, this is a poem brimming with optimism.
As readers, we presume, surely, that it’s a sunny morning, with blue skies, and that the sunshine has caused the celandines to unfurl. Their bright yellowness resembles a child’s conception of the sun their petals spoking like the sun’s rays. Richard Mabey, in Flora Britannica (Chatto and Windus, 1996), says that the word celandine
derives from the Greek chelidon, a swallow.’ The sixteenth-century herbalist Henry Lyte suggested that this was because it ‘beginneth to springe and to flower at the coming of the swallows’. But most celandines are in flower long before the swallows arrive, and it looks as if the lesser celandine may have been confused with the greater celandine, another yellow-flowered but quite unrelated species.
Mabey goes on to venture, quite reasonably, that the name suggests the flower ‘was seen as a kind of vegetable swallow, the flower that, like the bird, signalled the arrival of spring.’
He reminds us too, incidentally, that the flower’s most common alternative English name, historically at least, is pilewort, for its effectiveness against haemorrhoids. Meanwhile, Václav Větvička, in Wildflowers of Field and Woodland (Hamlyn, 1979), states that:
With its numerous tubers, Lesser Celandine is one of those plants which people often used to have to eat in mediaeval days during times of poor harvest or famine. Aptly then, it was called Manna from Heaven. Perhaps it is this historic role which has given rise to the German names Feigwurz, meaning root-fig, and Scharbockskraut (the most common name), a medicine for scurvy (a disease in times of want).
As I’ve written elsewhere, haiku which contain leading statements don’t usually float my boat, because they tell the reader too much. Here, though, the clause ‘the day’s gentle start’ is more like a compound noun – the sort for which German is renowned – than a statement, despite the fact that it does lead the reader in a certain direction. As such, the haiku reads like a succession of nouns which, thanks to the one-line form, elide to become one, in a single, heightened moment of simplicity and gladness. We can easily intuit Chard’s restrained joy. That ease does not make the poem any less effective; on the contrary, it allows the readers to stand in the poet’s shoes or boots and revel in the beauty of a delightful spring morning after the dull days of winter.
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 