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.
Tag: haiku
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On Ian Storr’s Late Light
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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 