Review of Diana Webb's TAKEAWAY

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Takeaway – a Collection of Haibun by Diana Webb (Hub Editions, Longholm, East Bank, Wingland, Sutton Bridge, Spalding, Lincolnshire, PE12 9YS, U.K. 2008), 20 x 13 cm. chapbook, ISBN: 978-1-903746-76-9. Available 5.50 pounds.

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Reviewed by Patricia Prime

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Takeaway is a nicely produced small book containing 40 haibun, divided into five sections. Many of the haibun, mostly one per page, consist of one paragraph of prose followed by a single haiku, although there are one or two exceptions. Takeaway is an extremely beautiful explanation of the memories, both cultural and personal, which haunt, yet comprise us. What is most striking is that the haibun seem to draw from the same wardrobe of topics. They show an intensely lived connection to the natural environment and to humanity and deal with personal experience: places (such as a glass tower, museums, cafes and the estuary); people met or remembered (grandmother, an aunt, her father, the pharmacist, friends and a lollipop lady); ruminations on paintings by Van Gogh, Millais, Degas, Monet,Turner and others, and poems that resonate with the sacred—the Pilgrim’s Way, Easter and a Covent Garden church.

The book’s first section “Reminiscence Work” is written from the poet’s point of view as she reminisces about her childhood. In the first haibun, “Ground,” Webb presents a conventional picture of a view from a “twenty first century glass tower”: “At the top of a twenty first century glass tower, views all around and a window as far back as I can see: this 1940’s ‘Children’s Paradise’.” In “not just teddy” Webb writes about what she would save if there was a fire:

If the flat caught fire and I could save only one thing, I would save this bear. He no longer wears the blue and mustard striped jersey my father knitted after the war. His mournful smile absorbs the years, picnics and parties in his honour. Pooled childhoods. Sadness settles on him like dust.

my son types it in,
new e-mail password—
name of the old bear

In the second section, “On Canvas,” Webb reverts to one of her favourite themes: poems about painters and their work, projecting her views in her usual quiet style, as we see in the following haibun:

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Claude Monet—Monochrome
(High tide at Etretat, 1868; The Magpie, 1869)

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Water lilies wait under the weeping willows. Years before . . .

He labours through taste and sting of salt on November gales, the roar and the splash, to anchor an instant.

beyond whisked waves
peak of one dark rock—
man holds his hat down

He sets up his easel in the middle of a white winterscape, becomes part of it. Icicles form in his beard as the moment freezes.

one for sorrow
perched on the gate—
shadows on snow

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As it turns out, the place where Webb really writes in her own voice is in the book’s third section, “Particulars of Place.” In narrative terms, in this section Webb reaffirms her allegiance to the beauty of the English countryside, as we see in the prose section of “A Space":

Vibrant with birdsong, a wooded backdrop. A large oak overhangs, as nettles and grasses partly curtain the small eighteenth century landscape bridge with its central ornamental shell, arched over weed aflit with damselflies . . .

In “Chamber of Commerce,” the fourth section, the haibun are full of precision, music and rhythm. Here is an excerpt from “Surfaces”:

Blue Café—a pigeon swept sky reflected in the glassy table top.

Home—maybe reading . . .

lifting down
the Zen poem book—
a cloud of dust

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Webb’s main strength is her imagery. One of my favourite haibun is “Matinee Idol,” from section five, “Sacred Spaces”:

One by one he lights the candles, opens the book at the appropriate pages, starts to ring the bell. The Covent Garden church, famed for its memorials to people of the theatre, emptied now of tourists.

...................‘For I will consider my cat Jeoffrey’
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at the chancel steps
SILENCE
on four white paws

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This is a successful and poignant image because the haiku reinforces the prose topic, the cat. Many other images in Webb’s haibun are clever, striking and communicative. The haiku are at least as well written as the prose: every word carries weight; every punctuation mark counts; language, meaning and form are interdependent.

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Several of the haibun in the final section, “Crossing Boundaries,” are longer in form. Webb can make a tight image-sequence like “Pinned” work, and is even more successful with a more diffuse haibun like “Time Wasting” which sets up a conversation between the poet as a child and a lay teacher at her convent school. Here and elsewhere in the collection, Webb shows herself simultaneously immersed in the landscape and rituals of English life—school, holidays, shopping, church—and engaged with a wider painterly sphere. Several haibun cite painter’s influences: Van Gogh, Degas, Turner, and Monet, to name a few. A brief haibun from this section is “A Holiday (Edward H Potthast)”:

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Most paintings of such views are one third sea and two thirds sky, but this one fills the canvas almost to the top with damp sand, shallows, waves . . .

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sifting through
a small girl’s fingers
worlds

The haibun at the end of the collection “Connecting” transports us to the persona’s choice of buying beads instead of a book of poems, evoking a level of interest which makes us look back with new eyes on the haibun which make up the rest of the book. Here is an extract from the haibun:

As the small glass spheres slip one by one along the needle into the growing necklace, her reflections drift from by gone generations through parting with a lover to embryos in formation. A tranquility, each moment hovers.

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cobweb strung with mist
across stems of lavender—
span of light years

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Webb gives us poetry which invites us to take our time, return and reread to reflect on its imagery and allusions. Webb is a thoughtful, sensitive and lucid writer; this collection has the depth, breadth and vigour to make us take her seriously. Her haibun are full of warmth, humility and poise. This is a collection to enjoy in moments of solitude and maintains the high standard we have come to expect from the poet.

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by Patricia Prime

Auckland, New Zealand

Marleen Wenneker-Hulst: SUNNYSIDE UP

I am on the ferry to Schiermonnikoog on this warm and bright Sunday morning. Despite the early hour two girls, students I gather, are cheering the crowd on board. Wearing extravagant hats they go jigging and singing along the lower deck. However eyebrows are raised at first, most people appear to enjoy it all the same.

summer wind—
the captain winks
as waves splatter

Later that day, I stop in the village for an ice cream. Across the street, the two girls from the ferry are baking eggs on a tiny gas cooker. “EGG SANDWICH SUNNYSIDE UP—ONLY 1 EURO”, their handwritten sign reads. It is obvious that they are amusing themselves, even though their clientele seems somewhat disappointing. This cannot have anything to do with lack of enthusiasm; their merchandise is being recommended as irresistibly tasty to anyone they see.

Watching those girls doing business in this cheerful manner is catching. It seems though that putting a smile on people’s faces is more rewarding to them than making money. Today anyway.

shovels and buckets
in the baggage rack
beach shuttlebus

by Marleen Wenneker-Hulst
Musselkanaal, the Netherlands

Catherine Mair & Patricia Prime: DESERT CAMP

When my uncle sailed on the Rangitata with the first echelon for Egypt, he left his farm in my parents' care. Their first task was to build a cottage for sharemilkers. Wick and Betty were a fine Maori couple with four children of similar age to us. We used to love going down to the tiny cottage to watch Betty groom her girls' hair. How we admired those bouncy, black ringlets.

in the porch
a milk billy
hung from a nail

The young man wrote home about his experiences of the wartime camp in the Egyptian desert. He described the dirt tracks beside which huts were erected, wells dug, and the transient army camp which grew into a city like no other. He told us the Maadi camp sported cinemas, bars, canteens, chapels, libraries, sports fields, a swimming pool - even an ice cream and meat pie factory.

in his photo
soldiers in 'lemon squeezers'
beside the Sphinx

He wrote in a postcard, "The ramshackle cinema, named Thomas Shafto, near the entrance to the camp, is the first building we see on our return to Maadi from the Western Desert."

veteran's parade . . .
one less companion
to greet

*lemon squeezer—nickname given to the Kiwi soldier's pointed hat.

by Catherine Mair and Patricia Prime
Katikati, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand
and Auckland, New Zealand

Richard Straw: PLATO’S CAVE

I meet by chance on the street someone who resembles one of my dead grandpas and who could be the twin brother of Carl Sandburg, who died even longer ago. We walk into his basement apartment, the entrance a trap door. It's either that or a farmhouse cellar—hard to tell in the dream. He tells me his problem—what to do with his many manuscripts, books, papers. I suggest hiring an assistant, someone who won't know or care that he's working for a well-known writer. We talk about Huckleberry Finn, why it's reread, despite its moral dilemmas, to re-create lost innocence.

As I glance at his close-cropped hair, crow's feet, tired but still-bright eyes, the scene shifts to midwinter in Ohio, snow a foot deep, and me standing in the kitchen of my parents' house, my last boyhood home in their small town. Beyond the dinette curtains, five horses, their nostrils steaming, wait on the moonlit driveway, which is cleared of snow. I cry out for dad to see. When I wake, a headache I've had for days is gone.

standing still
the longest time
roller coaster

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by Richard Straw
Cary, North Carolina
first published in Lynx V23, N1 (February 2008)

Review of Richard Straw's THE LONGEST TIME

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The Longest Time: Haibun by Richard Straw (privately printed: 107 Mont de Sion Drive, Cary, NC 27513, USA. 2009). 21 x 14 cm chapbook, obtainable from the author. $5 US; $8 US abroad (added S&H). Cover photographs are by Marissa Rachel Straw. Other images are from family albums and postcards.

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Reviewed by Patricia Prime

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Richard Straw’s collection of haibun, The Longest Time, is, in its own way, about explorations and discoveries of the self which are as much cerebral and metaphysical as geographical and physical. Mostly, the paths readers are taken along by Straw have origins that are intriguing and transits that are stimulating. Each haibun describes a memory—from childhood growing up in a “walk-up apartment above a soda shop” to the poet making resolutions to himself in the final haibun, “Whether Together or Apart,” before going to sleep:

What was it I told myself last night before going to sleep? Just before the headlights dimmed against the wall, after the last neighbor pulled into the parking lot outside my window, I’d promised myself something that I can’t remember now, even though with three cups of coffee drunk and a fourth one brewing on the hotplate. I haven’t been able to remember anything lately unless I wrote it down.

Straw’s opening line to the succinct haibun “First Impressions” exemplifies the ethos behind this collection. Memory, confrontation, and deconstruction: this is a book laden with possibilities and the permutations and permeations that result from the memories of a lifetime. So often these haibun arise out of an engagement with the personal and the landscape, real but also charged with poetic diction. Take the following prose excerpt from “A Helping Hand”:

And I peer past my ear into the black air register from which, as if quaking in my bedroom on the other side, Fay Wray screams and screams and screams as she’s carried into the jungle by King Kong.

Here the reader’s taken through a landscape that’s at once familiar and yet subjective, a combination that ensures that our view of the recognizable and intimate can become at once estranged and unfamiliar. The entire transformation hinges upon memory—upon whether what is remembered is truthful or a fabrication with a kernel of truth which transforms it.

It’s a battle of words versus memory that’s present in all the haibun. “Sunday Drive” (illustrated by a photo of the poet’s parents) is an evocation of a visit to a relative’s farm:

Our parents take my sister and me to a relative’s farm near Sunbury. The barnyard’s full of running headless chickens and a crazed dog. The farmer uses a tree stump as a chopping block. Much later his son dies James Dean style on graduation night.

empty space
where flower pots were
a wasp returns

“Katallagete,” apart from being indicative of Straw’s delight in playing with recall, assumption, locale and history, personal and collective, also epitomizes an authorial interest in friendship and the poetical exploration of youthful experiences:

Bright spots are rare in this small town, even on Christmas Eve. Earlier tonight, after watching a campy movie in a cold theater, I joined a couple of older friends, Junior and Jesse, to go caroling. Rather than ask them to drop me off at home later, I agreed to chug-a-lug beers at their apartment above Jack’s TV shop. Then, on Junior’s dare, we almost got shot at by Foxy on Senate Street because of something Jesse said to one of Foxy’s girls. We got separated at The Attic after I was pushed down the wide wooden stairs for getting up on the bar with a go-go-dancer.

“Festival of Lights” is a lovely depiction of nature observed on a journey home from work in wintertime:

I drive home from work. Bright colors frame windows and doors; electric candles rest on windowsills. Pine branches drape entry ways, even garage doors. Pulsing lights reveal the limbs of leafless saplings. Wooden Santas, nutcracker soldiers, and white deer pose on snowless lawns.

at home
blue menorah candles
smolder

Several haibun focus on Straw’s father. “Stronger Grip” reflects on his father’s illness in a heartbreaking contemplation. Before the writer hurries off to catch a plane, he plays a childhood game with his father who is in a private hospital room:

I tell him that I have to hurry back to the airport for a midday flight. Then I reach for his hand, and we play an old game: “Who has the stronger grip?” This time, I let him win. I try to smile as I say, “Bye, take care.”

After saying goodbye and talking to a nurse, the poet tells us his reaction:

I rush into a bathroom and begin sobbing. I continue to cry in the empty elevator, then in the rental car all the way to the airport, quieting finally on the packed plane.

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Easter snapshot

a boy and his dad

cast one shadow

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“Handed On,” is a fraught personal reaction to the father’s death and funeral. It is a personification of all the conflicts—belief-versus-practice, memory-versus-history, public-versus-private space—that engage Straw’s work:

Before the funeral service began, my cousins gave me a silver frame, “In Loving Memory of My Father . . .,” with a photo of dad and me shaking hands and smiling on one of our birthdays 20 years before. A pianist played favorite hymns, the new minister from dad and mom’s church did the eulogy, and solemn men from dad’s lodge performed from memory a ceremony in his honor. Asked to say a few words, I merely recited with a bowed head Psalm 23 from an open Bible:

rain on a road
before his coffin is closed
touching dad’s hand

In the lengthy haibun “Sketching from Life,” Straw rightly notes his father’s dislikes and his lifelong job as a welder, and his discovery of a sketch he found on the table a week before his father died:

Dad did one other sketch that I found on his kitchen dinette table the week before he died. He drew it with a ballpoint pen in blue ink on a brown envelope containing a coffee-table book I’d mailed him for what turned out to be his final birthday the year before.

The poignancy of this haibun, with its meticulous attention to detail and its reference to a birthday present that will never be looked at, is extremely touching.

With equally heartfelt empathy, in “Perennials,” Straw writes about his mother:”After 50 years with multiple sclerosis, every nerve she has is scarred. And since dad’s death, premature senility has taken her mind.” He completes the haibun with this poignant memory of his mother:
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During her first winter there, mom told me she’d been studying “a large menacing goldfish” in the front lobby’s aquarium. She said that most of the other fish in the tank had disappeared, except for one or two hiding in corners. She whispered, “I’ve always been a small fish watching and staying out of the way of larger fish.”

long winter
in an untended flowerbed
tulip bulbs

For Straw the personal so often acts as a medium transporting haibun and reader to another terrain—historical, psychological, religious and physical. As well as seriousness, there’s a great deal of playfulness to be had here too. Take, for instance, the powerful “Fiddling On,” a haibun scanning symbolic and real events. In this excerpt, Straw writes about a photo he shows to his children:

The kids study it, but draw blanks. So, I tell them that years ago my mom photographed my dad, his brother, and me in an Ohio apple orchard. Dad’s and my uncle’s sacks are chock full and sit lopsided in tall grass. The apples lasted until Thanksgiving and went into pies served hot with vanilla ice cream. Our kids never met my uncle, though, and they saw my dad just once or twice. They barely recognize me with my moustache and long hair.

This is typical of Straw’s trick throughout The Longest Time: to guide the reader along trajectories that derive intensity from memory and locale. Quite simply, the book moves us. Through its charting of historical and emotional spectrums, we’re untroubled in attaining the collection’s higher philosophy.

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by Patricia Prime

Auckland, New Zealand

Charles Hansmann: EN POINTE

Someone’s daughter loves to dance. Any unheard music seems to do, and any partner. The table’s shimmed leg attends her lifted heel. She gains a peek beyond the windowsill.

ballet slippers
pigeon-toed
beside the bed
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by Charles Hansmann
Sea Cliff, New York
first published in Frogpond 31: 1 (Winter 2008)

Stanley Pelter: CITY OF GIFTS

not quite ready to fly
a pale dove flitters
river curve

Fancy going to Florence on Wednesday?
Where?
Florence
Where’s that?
Italy
How come?
Someone’s cancelled. I’ll square it with school.
Thanks....................................................but no thanks.
Why not?.....................................It’s only for a couple of days.
I don’t know anybody. They’re learning Italian. I’m younger than them. I’ve got lots on. .............I don’t want to.
Most are young.........very friendly.........and I’ll be with you.
She is 12........................................Square it with School.

It’s your bat mitzva
What?..............................................Can I sit by the window?
Yes
They have been friendly. She is relaxed. Flight will arrive early morning. Seems to sleep; head to one side, eyes closed. Rapid first growth of morning. Pre-sun glow spreads across a clear blue light of Florentine sky. Opens her eyes. Descent follows bridged line of river Arno. Slowly we lower. Early sun shapes all colours and hues. Luminous space of a City of Gifts is compressed. Not blinking, she looks down on an unfamiliar roofscape. I know that look.

cage glides to earth
which we watch grow large
she silent............wide eyed

Why didn’t you tell me?
There is more

Let’s walk. Go to the Accademia. Visit David
We look up at this translated marble, lit by a midday sun. A dome flows light. A frozen moment of silence dominates space a juvenile giant occupies. At first she doesn’t speak. Then . . .
Who made it? David was the small one, not the giant.
Michelangelo. He does reverse things a bit. Usual image is after their battle. Michelangelo describes that moment when a childman makes a momentous decision, enters an arena of power. One act will change his life forever. See that huge veined hand, its position, sling lifted, ready to kill. Michelangelo was a little man with a broken nose. David was his gigantic, one-man rebellion against convention, against accepted tradition. Single-handedly, this huge Italian created a spatial, a temporal shift that had a profound effect on river flows of art.
I had said too much. Said it all wrong. She says nothing. Is still looking up at this boy who would be King. After two hard years of carving, here he stands, a technical, an aesthetic marvel. Unsurpassed. Maybe those ‘Slaves’ emerging from rocks. Perhaps his ‘Pietà’. We walk away. Walk towards the Ponte Vecchio with its sparkling gold, shining silver shops, past the Uffizi, the Piazza del Duomo, to the Brancacci Chapel. Stand silently before Masaccio’s ‘The Expulsion of Adam and Eve’ and, in disbelief, ‘St Peter healing the Sick with his Shadow’. Walk. Walk in silence. Walk until the sun tires.

She puts her arm through mine like a grown up woman.

river view
see clouds in ways
that change everything
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by Stanley Pelter
Claypole, Lincolnshire, England

Richard Straw: FIDDLING ON

In late October, the last of summer's crickets can still be heard amid the leaves and twigs near my office here in North Carolina. They're not like the ones I grew up with in Ohio that are driven underground a bit earlier by colder weather.

Once I get home, I flip through several family albums, looking for one photo in particular. I almost don't hear my wife calling me downstairs for supper. At the table, I pass around the photo, saying, "See anyone you know?"

The kids study it, but draw blanks. So, I tell them that years ago my mom photographed my dad, his brother, and me in an Ohio apple orchard. Dad's and my uncle's sacks are chock full and sit lopsided in tall grass. The apples lasted until Thanksgiving and went into pies served hot with vanilla ice cream. Our kids never met my uncle, though, and they saw my dad just once or twice. They barely recognize me with my moustache and long hair.

I don't tell them of the evening when my uncle, surrounded by his family, died painfully at home of lung cancer. I also don't tell them of the night my dad called me after he learned he had terminal cancer in early autumn as the leaves were turning red and gold. They're beginning to realize on their own why my mom doesn't say much when we phone her on Sundays at the nursing center, that her premature senility doesn't mean she loves them any less.

"Someday," I do say, "we'll go apple picking. Wouldn't that be fun?"

apple pickers gone
down among the windfall
a muted cricket

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by Richard Straw
Cary, North Carolina
haibun first published in Contemporary Haibun Online V3, N2 (June 2007)
haiku first published in Acorn 17 (Fall 2006)

Catherine Mair & Patricia Prime: FOREBEARS

I swish back the curtains. There's a drowned cabbage-tree silhouetted against the sea-grey sky. Rain forms a mini-waterfall from each sword-like leaf. At the supermarket I notice sunflowers propped in a bucket. Sunflowers! for a rainy day. Sunflowers to brighten Mum's room at the resthome.

an afternoon
for videos—which?
reading glasses at home

The chapbook "Molly's Room" lies on the table. The photo collages remind Duncan of his great-grandparents who arrived in New Zealand in 1870 to set up shop in Remuera (now one of Auckland 's high-end shopping centres). He recalls how an uncle 'married' a Maori girl and fathered five children before his lawful wife arrived from Britain and he fathered another seven with her. The Maori 'wife' returned with her children to her whanau, but one daughter remained with her father. Missionaries taught her to play the piano and eventually she became a concert pianist.

seaman—
his scarred hand
fingers the pages

Skeletons in cupboards. The ambiguity of surnames. How, why—our father, your father?

family wedding
duskier skins
on one side of the church

by Catherine Mair and Patricia Prime
Katikati, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand
and Auckland, New Zealand
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*whanau—family

Charles Hansmann: SLANT

Some times of day don’t show themselves direct—they’re just reflected on the surface, skittish moments slinking down to drink, rippling indistinct the instant that we see them. Then turn around. Some times of day only follow on their memory, haven’t happened till they’re past, a set sun lighting up the hill behind, reappearing as we climb.

up all night
to see what cats see
alley moon

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by Charles Hansmann
Sea Cliff, New York
first published in Frogpond 31:2 (Spring/Summer 2008)

Dru Philippou: WIND POWER

On the Beaufort Scale of 2, a light breeze forms wavelets, rustles palms. On the scale of 4, a moderate breeze wipes footprints from the sand, blows a sailboat out to sea—

And on 8, a gale of 40 knots, I paddle my surfboard out in the ocean; make it to the lineup, sit-up, and wait for the sets. A swell approaches. Turning the nose of my board shoreward, I start to paddle then stand. I ride towards those palm branches snapping, and breakers crashing against rock; my mother’s voice gone.

a deep-sea
anglerfish slams
its mouth shut—
for a limpet,
an unknown universe.
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by Dru Philippou
Taos, New Mexico
first published in Modern English Tanka, V3 N2 (Winter 2008)

Richard Straw: DESERT PLACES

In omnibus requiem quaesivi et nusquam inveni nisi in een Hoecken met een Böcken.

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—Thomas à Kempis

"Everywhere I have sought rest and found it nowhere, save in little nooks with little books." His monastery cell and lancet window reappear now on a second-hand bookstore's shelf, where I find him again remaindered, but translated afresh.

I trust and collect such personal jottings, especially those published anonymously or collected posthumously by friends. Steady correspondents; meditative diarists and fiction writers; reclusive poets, aphorists, and parable tellers; and especially this speaker of homilies to common brethren—all capture the small moments. The words are not short-sighted, despite their authors' often being short-winded. Without them, there's no antidote to the daily bluster.

At home, going at a labyrinth walk's pace, I begin this updated version of the Imitation, penciling in light marginal notes and comparisons with its prior translations. My eyes close to visualize the words. My wristwatch ticks as I breathe air from the past.

mountaintop
I reach out to feel
clouds
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by Richard Straw
Cary, North Carolina
first published in Contemporary Haibun Online V3, N4 (December 2007)
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The Thomas à Kempis quotation is from an article by Vincent Scully that appeared in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912, Volume XIV; see http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14661a.htm).

Tish Davis: CHAMPAGNE MUSIC

I slip the Lawrence Welk DVD into the player and whisper, “Mom, our first sleep over.”

Black and whites change with the notes on his accordion, shadows crossing her toes exposed at the bottom of the bed. Now finished, the nurse returns the blanket charting the formalities under the watchful eye of the Franciscan cross hanging on the wall. An aide helps me move the recliner closer. A pajama party—I remembered to bring my own pillow.

light and bubbly
a respirator breathes
for both of us

by Tish Davis
Dublin, Ohio
first published in Ink, Sweat and Tears (March 5, 2008)

Announcement & Update: The Biennial British Haiku Society Haibun Anthology 2009

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The British Haiku Society has extended the closing date for this international award to 1 October 2009 because the editors felt that there were insufficient entries of a strong enough quality.

You now have a further opportunity to send in your best haibun that illustrate an awareness of the relationship between the prose and haiku. The editors recommend that you think about the points below.

*Can the haiku stand alone and relate to the prose yet without repeating the same idea?
*Is there an identifiable theme that still leaves room for the reader to participate and find meaning?
*Is the language precise and fresh?

Conditions of entry:
*Open to all, except BHS committee members and any others involved with the administration of the anthology.
*Submissions must be written in English and be between 100 and 2000 words long, including haiku.
*Work must be unpublished and not under consideration for publication elsewhere.
*Each haibun should be given a title.

Entries will not be returned, so please retain copies of your submission. Copyright reverts to the author after publication in the anthology. In the event of there still being insufficient quantity and/or quality of submissions, those that are received will be carried forward for consideration for the 2011 anthology.

Submission details:
*Three copies of each haibun, with each copy starting on a separate A4 sheet.
*One copy should show your name, address, telephone number and email address (if applicable).
*The other two copies should contain no identification.

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Entries on disk (floppy or CD, in Word format) will be happily accepted.
If you require receipt of your entry, please either request an email acknowledgement or send an SAE , or, for those overseas, an IRC stamped by the originating office.

Entry fee: £6.00 (cheques to ‘British Haiku Society’), or US$ 12 (in dollar bills), plus £3/6$ for each additional haibun.

Closing date: In hand by 1 October 2009.

Address for entries: Andrew Shimield, Haibun Anthology, 18 Deepwell Close, Isleworth, Middlesex , TW7 5EN , UK .

Selection and appraisal: The process will be undertaken by Jo Pacsoo and Lynne Rees. They will select the haibun for publication in the anthology, and will provide an appraisal of each haibun selected. It is anticipated that the anthology, whose title will be drawn from the selected haibun, will be published in spring 2010.

Copyright reverts to the author on publication, but entry to the 2009 anthology signifies agreement to your work being published digitally by the Society or copied for archival purposes (for example, by the British Library or Poetry Society).

All entrants will receive one copy of the anthology.

Barbara Strang: THE OMAUI ROAD

The grownups are behind a newspaper. Something is being decided. At 10.30 our family crams into the Morris 8, Mum, Dad and baby in the front, and three of us packed in the back with belongings. We start along the windswept road to Bluff, but soon turn down a rutted track. Before us lies a sea of speckled mud.

The road to Omaui is not a road at all—it lies across this inlet called the Mokemoke, usually full of water. But where has it all gone? It could come rushing back . . . in one huge wave, engulfing the Morris 8, and us. We whizz over the smooth surface, probably crushing thousands of crabs. Ever closer to mysterious Omaui Hill with the three weird bumps on top.

Some day they will build a proper road to Omaui, which will skirt the Mokemoke and thrust through the patch of bush. We will drive there on Sunday afternoons.

almost hidden
amongst flax bushes­—
the crib!

Note: “Flax”—the native harakeke, whose sword-like leaves can grow over six feet. “Crib”—Southern New Zealand dialect meaning holiday cottage

by Barbara Strang
Christchurch, New Zealand
first published in Kokako 6, 2007

Bob Lucky: DR. LIVINGSTON, YOU PRESUME

I went to see my Chinese doctor this morning and wanted to say “Dr. Livingston, I presume,” but I bit my tongue, so to speak, and didn’t say anything but “Good morning” because, well, first of all, that’s probably the joke he is most sick of since that is his name, though he’s a physician and should be able to heal himself, and second, though it’s not related, is that he’s not Chinese but American, he just practices Chinese medicine, and that’s quite an accomplishment because if I’m not mistaken, and I have been before, he is the only non-Chinese doctor in China allowed or registered or certified or whatever it is they do here to practice Chinese medicine.

chilly morning
the blind erhu player
warms up

I am wishing my wife were here because she knows everything that is wrong with me, like the sneezing I always forget to mention, as Dr. Livingston and I gossip a bit about mutual acquaintances and he gets down to business taking my pulse and checking out my tongue and asking questions about my digestion and appetite and cough and have I been following his dietary recommendations, and I tell him that China makes me sick, and he laughs because we both know the air is horrible and we might as well take up a three-pack a day habit, and I’ve been coughing for two years, which he already knows, but my appetite is good and every time I eat fried food I think of what he’s told me, and then I remember a recent foot massage I had and tell him about how the masseuse looked at my big toe on my left foot and said I wasn’t sleeping well, and he just gives me this funny smile and says, “They always say that or something about your digestion.”

overcast skies
artificial sunflowers
turned to the window

Tapping his fingers lightly on the table and furrowing his brow, he gets very serious as he writes out a prescription for a Chinese herbal tea to help correct my damp heat stagnation, which he diagnosed partly by pushing all around my abdomen until he found out where it hurt, and to be honest I have no idea what damp heat stagnation is but I trust this man, for he is my doctor after all, and he’s kind, and most amazingly to me, he can write and speak Chinese like a native, and yes, as I said, I’m amazed but also jealous because Chinese has proven to be a completely foreign language to me, maybe because my brain is too filled with bits and pieces of other languages, of Hindi and Spanish mostly, but oddly what comes out of my mouth most often and inadvertently since living in China is Japanese, which I suppose the Chinese wouldn’t like if they knew what I was saying, though I’m not really saying much.

year of the rat
erasing the crossword
year of the cow

When it is time to go, I really don’t want to go because I know the next stop is the Chinese herb shop where I will have to push old ladies and stooped men out the way just to get a free cup of tea to get the courage to stand in line to pay before I go to the counter and join the scrum to get my herbs bundled up into little packages, and then I’ll have to walk around for an hour or two or hang out in a café while they put it all together, which isn’t so bad in Hangzhou if the air is okay that day, and later I’ll push my way back to the front of the counter and take my herbs home and make tea, at least that’s what they call it, but it is really the most god-awful concoction you can imagine, no matter what combination of herbs you get or even if you throw in a bit of cardamom toward the end of the first boiling, and this brew takes two boilings to release all the terrible smelling elixirs that will rejuvenate you, but in the meantime, at least for the next two weeks, you feel like the wicked witch of the west hovering over her cauldron, and you may look just as green, and you can’t invite anyone over to your apartment during that time because the place smells so bad, as if the family pet has died and been left in a corner because no one has the heart to take it outside and say goodbye.

winter thaw
the sweet potato vendor
pokes his last tuber

by Bob Lucky
Hangzhou, China

Marleen Wenneker-Hulst: PHOTO

Sorting out an old box I come across my kindergarten class photo. I find myself on the front row, smiling, wearing the red and yellow dress I remember so well. Looking at the picture more closely I recognize the dark haired girl sitting next to me as Janine, now spouse of my colleague Jacob.

I take the photograph with me to the office the next morning, curious to see his reaction. But he starts laughing and waves the picture away, clearly refusing to face the image of the little girl who so many years later became his wife.

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Bringing up your childhood like that means you are getting old, he says later.

thick snow
her steps
in his

by Marleen Wenneker-Hulst
Musselkanaal, the Netherlands

Ralph Murre: MARCH 19TH, BAILEYS HARBOR

The sound is a blackbird, forever clearing its throat, like the morning-after chanteuse of a smoke filled club. A barking crow. A crowing dog. A cardinal calling for love as if a red shirt isn't enough. There's a rattle of pick-up trucks bound toward morning coffee, the discussion of March Madness and no work, yet the light has an angle of promise. A trickle of snowmelt and an old woman scrub at little corners of big problems, and the town yawns, if a town can yawn, into grudging wakefulness. The ice is mostly gone from the lake.
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a blackbird
in all its darkness
a bright wing
.

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by Ralph Murre
Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin

Ruth Franke: TEN BARS OF CHOCOLATE

At the department store the girl at the cash desk runs her eye over the elderly gentleman who is pushing towards her ten bars of chocolate, top quality brand. Angular face, silvery hair, slight stoop, refined in a low key sort of way. Surrounding him, though, an atmosphere of trepidation and a barrier of silence.

Images flood the mind: an art exhibition with water colours of flowers by a young lady. The amateur artist herself ― elegant, sporty appearance, has had some success in the tennis world. The husband at her side older by some tens of years, grey-haired, clear-cut features. Then a winter scene: black ice, the man losing control of his Mercedes. He escaping injury, the young woman, no seatbelt on, paralyzed from the waist down. She doesn’t go out in public any more.

ravishing flowers
behind glass
no trace of scent

Years later the gentleman stands at the cash desk in the department store again ― with ten bars of chocolate, top quality brand. As ever carefully dressed, the stoop more pronounced, thinner now the silvery hair. A barrier of silence around him, but without trepidation.

He must be over eighty now and his wife somewhere around fifty . . .

on a park bench
withered pine needles
still in pairs


translation from German by David Cobb

by Ruth Franke

Emmendingen, Baden-Württemberg. Germany
first published in Blithe Spirit 18/4 (2008)

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Zehn Tafeln Schokolade

Die Kassiererin im Kaufhaus mustert den älteren Herrn, der ihr zehn Tafeln Schokolade, edelste Sorte, hinschiebt. Scharf geschnittenes Gesicht, weißes Haar, leicht gebeugt, diskrete Eleganz. Um ihn herum ein jähes Erschrecken und eine Mauer des Schweigens.

Bilder steigen auf: eine Kunstausstellung, darunter Blumen-Aquarelle einer jungen Frau. Die Hobby-Malerin selbst – elegante, sportliche Erscheinung, erfolgreiche Tennisspielerin. Daneben ihr Mann - Jahrzehnte älter, graues Haar, markantes Gesicht. Dann der Winter, Glatteis, der Mann verliert die Kontrolle über den Mercedes. Er bleibt unverletzt, die junge Frau, nicht angeschnallt, ist querschnittsgelähmt. Sie zeigt sich nicht mehr in der Öffentlichkeit.

bezaubernde Blumen
hinter Glas
ganz ohne Duft

Jahre später steht der ältere Herr wieder an der Kasse des Kaufhauses mit zehn Tafeln Schokolade, edelste Sorte. Immer noch sorgfältig gekleidet, noch gebeugter, das weiße Haar schütter. Um ihn herum eine Mauer des Schweigens, doch kein Erschrecken.

Er müsste jetzt über achtzig sein und seine Frau um die fünfzig …

auf einer Parkbank
verdorrte Kiefernnadeln
paarweise

Zuerst veröffentlicht in Sommergras 12/2008.

Tish Davis: PAPIERS COUPES

I find the amputee's room. The old woman is busy gluing an orange ring of florets onto the center of a giant sunflower cut from paper. Pinned to the white wall next to her bed, larger than life cutouts of tulips and daisies—reds and yellows flourishing alongside white chrysanthemums.

lingering

in the meadow

lavender

“Do you know the old proverb,” I ask, “when you can put your foot on seven daisies summer has come?”

Without looking up, she passes me a roll of tape, asks if I would please hang the sunflower on her door. Scissors in hand, she is already cutting another.

collage . . .

faces of the sun

facing east

by Tish Davis

Dublin, Ohio

Jeffrey Winke: ELECTRIC-GREEN CHOKERS

The punch-metal gray-steel guard station looks formidable at the entrance to the intermodal station. It is cold, institutional. Two guards wearing reflective blue jumpsuits have a commanding view through the bullet-proof plate glass. A pleasant-looking couple tentatively approaches the station. They carry small, scuffed leather suitcases. Their electric-green chokers glow—alerting the guards of their threat status. Green indicates mild, yellow medium, and red’s a severe threat. The man speaks softly through the long, slender voice cone, “We wish passage to GADANK.” He wonders if he has been heard. He has. With a menacing leer, Guard A slowly appraises them, focusing his beady eyes on the young woman before sending a mild shock to her choker. “And what will YOU do to earn passage?” he asks the startled woman.

darkening office—
because he can, he tells her
to work overtime

by Jeffrey Winke
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Ruth Franke: A DOG’S LIFE

His regular pitch is on the forecourt of a supermarket; by his side an Alsatian, into whose muzzle passers-by often pop some titbit. Quite a few coins drop into his cap, quickly to be converted into liquid nourishment.

faithful companion
the last drips of beer
from the drop-out's flask

Some time ago he must have come into some money. The second dog, a dark brown puppy, had a comfortable trailer to sit in, and that just as spanking new as the bicycle pulling it. Clothes no longer in shreds, hair cropped short. Sometimes we even saw a mobile clapped to his ear. And then he vanished for months on end.

Now he has turned up again at his old haunt, completely changed: no bike, thin as a rake, gone to seed, and looking years older. Can hardly keep control of the exuberant dog. And winter's coming . . .

foliage aglow
one week of storms
and ready for sweeping

translated from German by David Cobb

by Ruth Franke

Emmendingen, Baden-Württemberg. Germany
first published in Blithe Spirit 17/1 (2007)

Hundeleben

Sein Stammplatz ist auf dem Gelände eines Supermarktes, neben ihm der treue Schäferhund, dem die Passanten oft einen Leckerbissen zustecken. Manche Münze fällt in seine Mütze und wird bald wieder in flüssige Nahrung umgesetzt.

kein Hundeleben
der letzte Schluck des Penners
für den Gefährten

Vor einiger Zeit muss er wohl zu Geld gekommen sein. Der zweite Hund, ein dunkelbrauner Welpe, bekam als Sitzplatz einen komfortablen Anhänger, ebenso neu wie das dazugehörige Fahrrad. Auch seine Kleidung nun nicht mehr abgerissen, die Haare kurz geschoren. Manchmal sahen wir sogar ein Handy an seinem Ohr. Dann war er monatelang verschwunden.

Völlig verändert taucht er jetzt wieder am alten Platz auf: ohne Fahrrad, abgemagert und verwahrlost, um Jahre gealtert. Kaum kann er den lebhaften Hund bändigen. Und der Winter steht bevor . . .

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leuchtendes Herbstlaub
nach einer Woche im Sturm
reif für den Besen

Zuerst veröffentlicht in Sommergras No.3/2007

Marleen Wenneker-Hulst: ELEVEN P.M.

The phone rings. Would I like to help him move out next Saturday evening at eleven p.m.? A bit overwhelmed by his question, I do not answer straight away but I recover quickly. Yes, of course I will be there. He sounds exhausted and his explanation is an emotional summary of facts. They broke up and he left. End of story.

I had known about the increasing conflicts in their relationship for some time, but I had certainly not expected this. He is determined to leave quickly and quietly and does not want nosy neighbors around, hence the time. I wonder if this would not cause the opposite effect, but I say nothing.

home alone—
the subtle scent of her perfume
in the bedroom

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by Marleen Wenneker-Hulst
Musselkanaal, the Netherlands

Bob Lucky: PROUST NEVER ATE BUTTERMILK PIE

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.family reunion
pies lined up on the counter
to cool

I’ve spent half my life trying to explain buttermilk pie to those who haven’t had the pleasure. Once, living in Japan, I decided I would have to bake a pie to make my case for the superiority of buttermilk over all other pies. I served it to guests, Australians and Japanese, on Thanksgiving Day. It was almost too sweet to eat. The Japanese politely took a bite, hid their mouths behind their hands, nodded with ambiguous enthusiasm, and set their plates down with uncharacteristic decisiveness. The Australians were cheerfully blunt and expected to win the Noble Prize in medicine for identifying the main cause for obesity in Americans. Without much of a leg to stand on, a condition only partially to blame on the amount of wine drunk, I pointed an accusing finger at the quality of Japanese sugar.

Japanese New Year
choking on a piece
of green tea mochi

by Bob Lucky
Hangzhou, China

Jeffrey Harpeng: NIGHT JOURNEY

With her pillow and blanket she settles to sleep on her bedroom floor.

Later as I am heading off to bed, she is sleeping in her doorway, knees tucked under, bottom in the air, arms forward over her pillow. She is stretched, as in prayer, toward mummy’s bed in the room across the hall.

In the morning, on my way to breakfast, I find her on the floor just inside mummy’s room, still sleeping toward Mecca.

the long night journey
without wings
to morning
a chorus of crow
parrot and dove calls

by Jeffrey Harpeng
Macgregor, Qld., Australia