Twenty years ago, Hamish Ironside – freelance typesetter of poetry and academic books, and later to be the driving force behind publisher Boatwhistle Books – wrote a haiku a day and collated the best of them into his first collection, Our Sweet Little Time, published by Iron Press in 2009 (and available here). Here are a couple of my favourites from it:
at the book fair
Darth Vader
gets in everyone’s way
my daughter’s screaming
settled by footage
of war in Iraq
As both of these show, Ironside, like a modern Logan Pearsall Smith, has a gift for noticing small but quirky things and for turning them into art: whereas the wording of the first one probably chose itself quite naturally, the choice of ‘settled’ in the second is inspired, in how it enhances the irony.
Ironside repeated the one-a-day trick in 2017, resulting in a second collection published by Iron in 2018, Three Blue Beans in a Blue Bladder (available here). Again, here are two favourites of mine, both of which speak for themselves:
in her newsreading voice
she tells me someone’s selling my book
for a penny
all things must pass
including my copy of
All Things Must Pass
In the interests of transparency, I should disclose here that I provided some (fairly-limited) assistance in the editing process of both books.
Ironside has now completed the hat-trick, having written a haiku every day last year, a selection of which can be found in Down Falls the Lark (hereafter referred to as DFL), which is also available from the Iron Press website, here.
As you can see from the poems above, Ironside is best-known in the small pond (replete with frog) that is the English-language haiku world for his senryu; that’s to say haiku that are principally concerned with the foibles, frailties, confusions and contradictions of human behaviour, not least his own, and which are often very funny. His preoccupations are largely unchanged: the pitfalls of the day job (‘before I press send / I check the pronouns / for the fourth time’); passing observations of creatures, including humans, acting in unusual ways; jokes at his wife’s and his own expense; wry existential despair (‘in the middle of the night / I can’t help imagining / the unimaginable’); the parent–child relationship; the similarity of birds’ flight and other actions to other objects (‘pelican preening / unfolds itself / like a Swiss Army knife’); and – among all the levity and self-deprecation – the occasional humdinger of a poignant, heartfelt and resonant haiku.
Here are two that I particularly like:
out of the cooling pan
the egg’s warmth rebuilds
like an erection
bleak midwinter—
scrubbing the grout
to a lighter grey
In the first, the close observation of the sensory experience, of the hand feeling the freshly-boiled egg, is surely given an extra dimension by the somewhat leftfield yet excellent and, of course, unexpected simile. It’s perceptive and it’s amusing, though it might also be, for some readers, a little close to the bone. (Alas, being from a different month, it doesn’t have this Ironside poem on the facing page: ‘on a hair trigger / the soap dispenser spurts / with enviable vigour’.) In haiku that require a verb, their success or otherwise almost always depends on the verbs that are used; here the choice is perfect. A lesser poet may have plumped for ‘renews’ but that would not have triggered the simile anywhere near as effectively.
The second is as spectacularly dreary, in a good way, as any winter haiku could be, though the fact that the protagonist ends up with ‘a lighter grey’ offers a glimmer of the renaissance that spring will eventually bring. The drear puts me in mind of a film I saw the other week, Winter of the Crow, set in Warsaw just as General Jaruzelski declared martial law on 13 December 1981 (coincidentally the same day on which the Marxist experimental composer Cornelius Cardew was murdered, by forces unknown, in Leyton); undoubtedly the most unremittingly grey film I’ve seen since Mike Leigh’s unwatchable Bleak Moments.
Across all three books, there is an underlying sense of the daily narrative of family life: the poet, his wife, and his daughter, who was a baby when the first book appeared and is now a young woman. As with all fine literature, there is also an implicit questioning of what it is to live a happy and fulfilled life.
Haiku traditionalists might baulk at some of Ironside’s quirkiest poems, e.g. what would they (and we) make of ‘bucolic England / sordid England / lucky penny’? And some might take issue with the absence of a strict syllable-count of 5-7-5, which, as everyone else knows, more often than not doesn’t work especially well in English-language haiku – Thom Gunn noted, about syllabics, that, ‘They’re really there for the sake of the writer rather than the reader.’ But Ironside’s paring of his haiku, his diction and his instinctively-fine grasp of where to put the line-breaks are invariably impeccable; consequently, he is never less than very readable
Each of these three books contains an illustration for each month’s selection, with an individual artist per book. DFL’s illustrations by Nathan Tolzmann extend that tradition brilliantly. I look forward to volume four in 10 years’ time.
Lastly, it would be remiss of me not to mention also that Hamish Ironside is the co-editor (with Gavin Hogg) of the brilliant and very entertaining oral history of British zines, We Peaked at Paper, available here, and is an irregular producer of zines himself, using an ancient Gestetner.
Tag: senryu
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On Hamish Ironside’s Down Falls the Lark
