Patricia Prime & Catherine Mair: Uretara Estuary

on the stop bank
wandering with the shadows
cast by clouds

We walk beside the estuary taking photographs of bird life: shags, herons, ducks, Canada geese, pied stilts and bitterns. Along the stop bank we meet a rat-poisoner and his wife laying bait among the reeds. "None of the bait has been taken," he says, "so we must be doing some good." About a kilometer along our path we come across a houseboat. A boy greets us from the top deck where he's fishing. In a small tree a thrush sings his heart out: his song never faltering as it changes from high to low, from a warble to a stream of sound.

calm lagoon—
a blue heron's
sudden flight

On the jetty across the river Christine tricks us into thinking she's a statue standing so still holding the long handle of her white-baiter's net. It is tempting to shout out, "Have you got any? How are they running?" But white-baiters are a secretive breed and rarely admit their success. We hope the bread we carry to feed the ducks isn't viewed as sustenance for the water rats. Coming towards us along the grassy path edged by flax is another walker with two fluffy white terriers. We pause for a brief chat about the pleasant change in the weather from yesterday's wind coming off the snow.

Look! there it is—
the bittern sculpture
on the opposite bank

It's a brisk walk back to the car. When we touch our cheeks, which feel hot and stinging, we find they are cold.

by Catherine Mair and Patricia Prime

Katikati, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand

and Auckland, New Zealand

Catherine Mair & Patricia Prime: The Ring of Fire

Well what are we moaning about? We knew the forecast was poor. For goodness sake, it's not a tsunami! Think of Samoa—beautiful Samoa where many of its villages and resorts are a tangle of coconut palms, corpses and mud. "Talofa," they used to greet us, golden-skinned young women and men in their colourful sarongs. "Talofa," as we skipped down for breakfast.
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hugging her teddy bear
she enchants
strumming guitarists

Friends, Heidi and Sam and their two children are asleep in their fale when they hear a noise like that of a jet plane zoom in from the sea. They look out to see the ocean receding. "Tsunami," Sam yells. "Get out quick, run to higher ground." They leave everything behind: passports, money, credit cards and clothes. Grabbing Misha's doll and Jake's toy car they run for their lives. The small girl clings to her father's back, while Jake is cradled in his mother's arms. When they reach the top of the hill, they are startled to see the devastation below. Where there once were sandy beaches, shelters and palm trees, there are piles of debris.

tidal wave—
a pleasure yacht
parked against a tree

by Catherine Mair and Patricia Prime

Katikati, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand

and Auckland, New Zealand

Review of Stanley Pelter’s SLIGHTLY SCENTED SHORT LIVED WORDS AND ROSES

slightly scented short lived words and roses by Stanley Pelter. (George Mann Publications, Eaton, Winchester, Hampshire SO21 IES, UK. 2009). 140 pp. ISBN: 978-0-95608-743-0. Available from the author at 5 School Lane, Claypole, Newark, Lincolnshire NG 23 5BQ, U.K. A gift book except for the cost of the stamp – 1.50 pounds UK; 2 Euro – Europe; $10 USA and Rest of the World.

Reviewed by Patricia Prime

Stanley Pelter has produced a considerable body of haibun. This is his fourth collection. Puzzles, conundrums, pithy arguments —none of these terms describe the poems in slightly scented short lived words and roses. Reading these poems I pictured myself arriving at an amusement park, only none of the rides are familiar. I considered I could break my neck or be catapulted into the sky. It’s only poetry, I remind myself, and climb on board. I’m having fun, and I don’t want it to end. The poems are gimlet sharp. So much happens in their winding shapes: wit, sorrow, and an intelligence that nips and worries its subjects into giving up their full oddity and originality. The reader does not consume this poetry; instead, they are pinched and prodded towards revelation. Each neat poem is a Pandora’s Box full of wonderful surprises.

The experience of reading Pelter is of an extraordinarily powerful tension between the reference to recognizable experiences and images and a prosodic technique which keeps such moments constantly on the move. Here are some lines from the first haibun “a dense bell rings”:

crumpled beige sheets
squashed beneath a king size dusk
fearful shadows

another. then another. intense. dense resonance.

one clutch of women hide under a heaving king-size kissing bed. move slightly
apart. still young, one is slightly older. with effort she opens her eyes wide. then they close.

These lines posit a narrator in the midst of a room filled with a “king-size kissing bed” and numerous women. Who they are and what they are doing there is left to the reader’s imagination. A hospital? A convent? A concentration camp? We can only imagine. The flow from haiku to prose and a final tanka creates a strong notational effect as if the environment is being mapped subjectively: “that was all I heard about them.”

In “A Small Matter of Principle” the syntax, various type faces, tanka in italics etc. has the effect of destabilizing the narratives in the poem, allowing inner and outer categories to blend. The opening tanka,

dry dahlia dust
floats inside bathroom spray
scarab shadow forms
merge with her naked body
until nude

although standing as an entirely different image, is linked to the prose by the use of such words as “bathroom,” “naked” and “nude.” This juxtaposition suggests different layers of perception of the environment both as reality, but also as representation.

“answer or question” relies for its theme on several of Pelter’s main preoccupations: art, music and literature. The poem opens with a quote from Paul Valery, “’We should apologise for daring to speak about painting.’” The next few lines give a perspective on the scene where two people with different interests—“he talks painting she talks music” —come together to discuss their differences.

“blind id” is divided into four parts: young.blind, prime.blind, middle.blind and old.blind. “Blind” here seems irresistibly to stand for all the sensations one may be blind to throughout life” blind to love, to feeling, to hurt, to being old. The amalgam of prose passages and ribbon-like thread of musical allusions in the tanka and haiku, are beautifully integrated.

In “disconnected bits?” the more analytical awareness of tanka, prose and text is highlighted by being set in italics, and reveals that we are facing boundaries: perhaps those of outside vs inside, private vs public, and these boundaries breathe a profound level of control. The combination of outside (rain, snow) inside (a restaurant) refigures the meaning to suggest that the man “who smiles is absent” is remote in the sense of isolated, rather than simply separate. That this is linked with the notion of control suggests the boundaries operating within this scene and, perhaps enforced by the cold, the “wind-ordered shapes” and the destruction done by the birds, amount to a form of social control.

What this reading attempts to demonstrate is how Pelter’s writing simulates experience in this notational way, whilst also reminding the reader of the textuality of the presentation, through the shifting syntax and avoidance of strict boundaries in typography. The tight patterning of the haiku and tanka within the text is a foil to this effect. Phrases like “here is a once-in-a-lifetime chance of over-hearing table wood communicating with an old door bleached of suffocating paint” (“excoriation”) remind us of the mediated representation, and that language, as much as urban architecture, and Duchamp’s art work “Large Glass. ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even’” are a background of conflicting spaces, boundaries and perimeters of meaning. These elements linked to Pelter’s approach to his writing and the emphasis in composition of bricolage, all suggest that the best way of thinking about Pelter’s poetry is to read, reread, savour and enjoy it.

“1/2 Price Sale – up to 70% off” takes us into another realm of Pelter’s imagination – conversation. He is adept at revealing his characters through dynamically recording their outbursts. It takes movement, speed and duration to capture the spoken word in a series of short, staccato sentences, such as: “’Is it in the Sale? Don’t’ think it is. Leave it. I’ll come back. Need to be sure. Weight. Need to lose. Coffee in Debenhams?’”

For Pelter, movement is one of the real systems whose existence in fact makes up our lives and those of his characters. For example, in “house odours—a preparation” he notes the way in which a couple discuss why he should want to visit a house in which he lived for seven years, and in which an old girlfriend now lives:

“Yes, I visited. I did live there for seven years”.
“But why should an old girlfriend be living there? Why did she ask you to
visit? Why did you go?”
Nerves wedged between a cleaned car, memories of her special scent, how he would explain that he kissed her on both cheeks.

These distinctions in Pelter’s haibun provide a useful figure for thinking about his poetic practice in a way that addresses both its form and content. Pelter’s poetry can be thought of as a special practice that holds our interest by virtue of its collage means of composition – gathering textual paragraphs and juxtaposing them with restrained haiku and tanka – and the resulting textual effect of an energetic series of responses to landscape, city and environment. Pelter’s poetry seems to inscribe the way in which we lead our lives in small parcels of time and space.

The innovative nature of “inheritance” figures the innovative use of language that Pelter’s poems exhibit: the collapsing of phrase with phrase, bi-directional syntax, use of italics and capital letters are actions in language akin to the person’s hiking, painting experience. When the person arrives at a cottage door, asking where he might find a café, he is invited inside for tea. After some conversation, he discovers that his hostess has two addictions: the 1967, 6 day War, and teapots. Pelter’s use of language serves to defamiliarise the normative appearance and apparent function of the poem – suggesting the unusual experience of his protagonist.

In the lengthy poem “it’s an insult to pigs and a creative gay – it is their way,” it is the character’s combination of Old English and baby talk which first greets the reader

furste of tidal nighte
compleates weaves of dual soundes
sande sweeps wone away

Dear ickle Stanley, of atheist purity, lowliest member of numero uno dissenters difficult tribe of kreatiff skeptics, I will tells of a jaw-droppling and wondrous evente. After that, hush!

The omission of linking words such as prepositions, pronouns and conjunctions within or between sentences, the use of capital letters, bold typeface, italics and unusual spelling, gives the poem its extremely unusual appearance and show how Pelter’s writing both utilizes the language and opens it up to questioning:

Blankness. Time compresses. Suddenly absent. Lacerated space not hurriedly filled. Only a busy cube remains to stain silence.

Time to act. Time to time a top-toe to tiny exit.


stand apart from him
from across a shaken field
lambs bleat

Pelter took the photograph of the artist David Hockney that accompanies this poem. The drawing he was doing as they reminisced, was a 21st Birthday Present to Pelter’s son.

“of crustaceans who, too, get born” is illustrated with a photograph of the author. Here, Pelter expands on the prose-poem with his use of opening and closing haiku. This free-association piece is a personal take on the author’s love of nature.

The variety in page lay-outs which mark many of the poems, prose-poems and non-poems helps maintain the interest of the reader which might otherwise wander in patches where obscure facts predominate. Some passages appear in the traditional verse forms of haiku and tanka, others in the attractive scattered arrangement familiar to Pelter’s poems, and still others in paragraph form or in columns down the side of pages, the decisions about format setting seeming arbitrary at times, as the verses may be no more or less poetic than the paragraphs.

“one shoe one drawing only,” a poem divided into four sections, is probably one of my favourites. In it, Pelter writes about a mother’s drawing of a shoe, the shoe, and the “Grannymum” who brought up the child after the mother’s death: “Eight, and my present is a drawing”. The young child is given both the remaining shoe and the drawing: “Sitting on a floorcushion, legs apart, I look hard at them both, as I have many times. One shoe one drawing only. See nothing else.

black shine
of an unfashionable shoe
secrets”

“Pablo? Misunderstood misogynist? Never” – parts 1 and 2, are something of a meeting between the artist and the poet, the concrete with the abstract. The places where these things meet are in the world of forms and structures; Pelter’s poems explore these borderlands by crossing literary boundaries. In this excerpt we overhear part of a conversation between the artist and his model:

All my life I have loved women. LOVED them.
No. You have loved love of possessing, loved stupendous images
short-changed into everyday Creative sexual ownership.
You calling my drawings, my etched images OverTheTop?
You know what I mean. Let me put it another way. It’s as if . . .
Stop! Hair’s moving. Still! That’s better. Nearly finished . . . that’s it.

In these two poems Pelter comes from an interesting angle. Perhaps as a voyeur?

As we have seen, he is not afraid to step out of the boundaries of traditional haibun. His units of composition encompass prose paragraphs, poetry, fragments, and conversation. Often, the fragments form a story, sometimes with conversation between characters. The shorter pieces may consist of constellations of only a few sentences. It is worth quoting “phaaaaackorph” in full:

goes pfuukkorf fukkawf –
dat wat am ee says at dem
oo soe doo luvz im


Ee never did gave respect or no even disrespec. Wha ee an da gager
do is ‘dissing’ an abe reeee-spek. An wen ee’s face becum seerislee
contort ee can oonly screeeech owt doze sownnds. An dees sownds
are ‘fuaarkcough’ an ‘phaaaaackawph’. Dat am all.

There is still a work of interpretation for the reader here, but the effect is not one of alienation. The reader can choose any of several possible interpretations of this poem, it does not matter which, it is clear that an image of human failing is central.

The title poem, “slightly scented short lived words and roses,” a constellation of five paragraphs, dissolves the anxiety of interpretation because they can be held in the mind at the same time and produce a kind of sublime poem; the whole thing a fragile yet valid moment of insight.

Another poem in the book that I like very much is called “the short straw.” It is in three sections divided with numbers. The whole thing should be studied, but it ends:

Later, with shriveled pupils, she looks inside my eyes. Her
only visitor. I try to read between heavily smoked lines, wanting to gauge
slippage, diminution. Unfamiliar, it easily misinterprets into something
like shorthand of each Carer’s intentions. Want to return her to an
importance but it is too late to transcend her near completion. She asks
me to leave. “It is time”, she mumbles into a most minimalist of kitsch
smiles while pressing her Gift tight to a concealed breast, “to
sleep”.

clouds reshape
already a slow drift
into yesterday

That paragraph will be one of recognition for many readers who find themselves in the situation of a caring for a loved one and watching their slow decline.

In the true story of “3 died young” Pelter must have felt he had disastrous invisible, destructive powers on those young women he fell in love with. It is another lengthy poem, divided by numbers into 6 sections. These again are a montage of haiku, prose passages, various fonts and type faces. Often inside the paragraphs or sentences, there is a dreamlike slippage into different registers and realities. On page 120 we read:

She said “it is bound to happen. sudden attacks are no joke. it will
happen again”. told so worried family not to. safely over first twenty
year finishing line. why not more? “shall paint standing up till I die” i
tell them. “that’s what’s happening, more or less. ok, i’m not standing
up, or only paint, will bathe after one more best night ever. Just one
night more. three of us died young. chaos. no more here for you”.

sculpted frame
after a twosome night
she is painted out

The reference to “sudden attacks” forces the reader to focus on the fact that life passes quickly and one should make the most of time.

Pelter’s poem “yakshi” allows for periods of reflection and lyricism not bound by considerations of typography, variety of syntax, or font, which sometimes distract from the poetry. Here there is an interesting development in the theme of the young girl admiring a sensual Indian statue. The poem contains dream-like sequences and reflections, which are linked in ways that are not obvious, as the girl on an academic trip confronts a piece which she has only ever seen in books:

She steps forward. Foot touches a sculptured spirit of a carved woman with luscious means, a binding, entwining mango tree bursting into full flower filled. So it is told. So let it be written. So
she knows it, now, then, into always.

stone tree-woman
releases interned warmth
carved lips taste shapes

A yakshi is a specific form of sculpture of a goddess entwined into and with a mango tree – love/fertility/nature etc. They form a column of a temple (stupa). The reference at the bottom refers to a famous temple, carved from top to bottom. The bottom layer is of physical sex in all its manifestations, accepted with gratitude but the lowest level of awareness. Each level of sculptures reduces this area but increases the more spiritual nature of sex as an aspect of the creative process. The topmost layer is of the most sublime sculptures of women doing no more than, via finger movements and body positions, express where we may reach in terms of ‘beyond the human’ awareness.

For me, Pelter’s strength as a poet is in his unusual connections, his sharpened eye for detail and ear for conversation, and his loosely organized use of language. The poems clearly relate to the modernist current, yet are concerned with construction, understanding and meaning. Illustrated with photographs and Pelter’s quirky drawings, this is a wonderful book to read, reread and savour.

by Patricia Prime

Auckland, New Zealand

Patricia Prime: The Hand Press

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My fiancé kept a hand printing press in his bedroom. He was a printer by trade and bought the press to make extra money. Two nights a week were spent printing invitations, business cards and letterheads.

.

The moveable metal type was kept in small boxes, each letter taken out individually and arranged into lines to form text, headings, captions. After the type was set and tightened, it was tapped into place. The paper was fed into the machine and rollers spread the ink under the pressure of the press. Several proofs had to be "run off" to ensure even coverage, clean print and correct order of type, which was positioned in a "mirror image"—something a skilled compositor could do in minutes.

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winter evening

the smell of chemicals

drifts from the window

the cat is stirred

from her sleep on the tiles

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My task was to clean and "break" the type after the job was completed. Each letter had to be cleaned and placed back in the correct tray which was a lengthy and tedious process.

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My future mother-in-law kept a wary eye on us. She'd interrupt every half-hour or so, with tea, a plate of biscuits, or a stern warning it was time for me to go. All this subterfuge to mask her worry over what—disguised by the clunk of heavy machinery—might be taking place in the bedroom.

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up and down the stairs

weathered floorboards

thud beneath the press

as she retrieves

cups and plates

.

After washing with industrial soap it was time to leave the room smelling of chemicals and ink. Cards laid out on the drying stacks. We walked home hand-in-hand.

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low in the sky

a crescent moon

bright and shiny

like the letter 'C'

in the compositor's tray

.

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by Patricia Prime
Auckland, New Zealand
first published in Modern English Tanka V3, N1 (Autumn 2008)

Catherine Mair & Patricia Prime: Chinese Checkers

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On my arrival the remnants of a party: balloons on the veranda, a piece of chocolate cake in the pantry, birthday cards on the dresser and toys spread over the floor. The children play with cars on the carpet, making roads and roundabouts with coloured clothes pegs. Later I offer to baby-sit the children while my friend and her daughter visit great-grandma. They decide to take the oldest boy with them.

.

wide-eyed she welcomes her visitors

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The youngest two occupy themselves with the road works, but when they become bored I play "Hangman" with them using simple three- and four-letter words. Next they want to play "Chinese Checkers," which lasts until they realize they are going to be beaten. As we play hide-and-seek in the bedroom, a Selwyn's friend spies us through the window. When the resthome visitors return it's time for dinner.

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in the bath

four arms, four legs,

a monster

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Next morning the family packs up leaving the house empty and quiet. Thistledown floats across the rain-drenched sun deck.

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folding the washing

we find a pair

of boy's socks

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

Review of Ken Jones' STONE LEEKS

Stone Leeks: More Haiku Stories by Ken Jones. (Pilgrim Press, Troedrhiwsebon, Cwmrheidol, Aberystwyth, SY23 3 NB, Wales. 2009). 96 pp. ISBN 978-0-9539901-6-0. Price: 6 pounds 50

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Reviewed by Patricia Prime

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Stone Leeks is typical Ken Jones. All these haibun follow the same path which his writing has followed in a long and distinguished career. Often reading these haibun I paused to reflect on the way these poems seem older, richer, more resigned versions of the same sort of haibun all the way from those of Pilgrim Foxes (2001, a volume shared with Jim Norton and Sean O’Conner), Arrow of Stones (2002), Stallion’s Crag (2003) and The Parsley Bed (2006).

There may be a little disappointment that there is no late flight of greatness in his writing, as he is perhaps one of the best practioners of haibun, if elegance and observation are criteria enough. We aren’t confronted with anything of strangeness or genius, but with a wry and beautiful understanding of the British countryside, and indeed, of human life.

This is not to say there is no development, or improvement. The collection contains five sections of 28 haibun on the themes of nature, absurdities, war, love and the inevitable winding down of life. Each section of haibun is interspersed with 59 free standing haiku.

The first haibun “Goodman’s Wood” is a fine story about an older, wiser narrator looking back on the woods where once lead mining took place:

Two hundred years ago there was some lead mining here—a truly hellish, poisoning occupation.

Spoil heap stained red
split needles
of the crooked pine

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Now the writer is in the area felling old trees. Here Jones unselfconsciously lets his talent for description render the scene. Like his other penchant, that of sage commentary, this seems slightly incongruous, but it is so much part of his style that we come to accept it.

“Let Me Be” is a slice-of-life story where, upon entering primeval woodland, Jones encounters a woman:

And then, I see here. She is climbing the crag ahead up a steep deer track, agile and sure-footed. Fawn shirt and matching slacks, brown shoulder length hair, and—decidedly odd—not even a day sac. To catch her up I climb the bare rock over to the left—a granite boiler plate, sticking to my boots, clinging to my fingers.

The concluding paragraph gives a sympathetic description of the woman’s disfigured face as she lopes away across a field.

In the second section, “Theatre of the Absurd,” I enjoyed “Seat 16,” where the subject is given a brief, transformative insight that transcends the world of travel:

Nonchalantly I explore my own coach and the adjacent ones. Mine alone has four more seat numbers than any other, yet carries the same number of seats. Ah, the ticket collector! He just shrugs: L’actualite, monsieur, souvent c’est bizarre. At this, Le Monde Diplomatique is lowered just enough to reveal a goatee beard and an ironic gaze: Soyez stoique, mon brave! He grins.

It is not so much the substance of the story that matters as the way Jones tells it with humour, his occasional use of French words and phrases and the surprising denouement.

In the third section, “War,” Jones’ details are perfect and delicious. Jones writes often of his wartime experiences and in “’We Shall Never Surrender!’” he writes about the local war effort:

All the usual divisions in our local war effort are forgotten. For a start, there’s the Red Dragon which flies in front of the Prince of Wales (again is it Owain Glyndwr or “Mr Windsor”?) and the Union Glad which Parson King flies from his church tower. But not today.

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Peaceful morning
both flags so limp
you can’t tell which

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Mind you, Caradoc ap Rhys, landlord of the Prince of Wales pub, has won one concession. All orders shall be shouted in Welsh, in order to confuse the Germans (and probably half the village).

His use of ordinary people and the vernacular is admirable. With perceptiveness and wisdom, he neatly captures a bygone era.

In “La Liberation,” he and a friend trudge the “ancient pilgrim route from Winchester cathedral to Mont Saint-Michel.” This story is maybe a response to those who see Jones as a “provincial”: someone who only describes or appreciates his own country of Wales:

Baguettes and camembert in the shade of tombstones. Angoville-au-Plein changed hands three times in three days. Inside its eleventh century church, bloodstained pews and bullet marks. Here Kenneth Moore and Robert Wright, US army medics, tended eighty American and German soldiers—and one French child.

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Army Surplus—
“Shell Wound Dressing”
5 euros

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All Jones’ characters are practically interchangeable: their lives are different but they have a wry, elegiac tone. They remark and draw out rather than criticize. The effect requires a suspension of disbelief but, in the end, you come to accept it as unchangeable, and look for nuances elsewhere.

For example, consider the final sentences of “Belle Époque,” “Untidy Loves” and “Song of the Saws” respectively (from the fourth section, “Love”):

*

And now all over Europe the lights are going out. As a foreign national I depart on the last train.
.

August 1914
the porcelain shepherdess
her smile

*

“Oh God, why is life so harsh for some?” I ask. “It’s to teach us to grind our teeth down to the stumps, that’s what it is, laddie”. Barefoot stubs out his Woodbine—hard.

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Old book cases
bowed shelves. A tumble
of reeling spines

*

What remains is a mound of sawdust swept in summer sunshine. She has wheeled the last load of firewood into the stable, to be stacked neatly in the stalls of farm horses.

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A long, ripe marriage
drumming logs into the barrow
our fire dance

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We cannot complain about writing this good. Jones wraps up his haibun with an authoritative voice, with a beautiful and complete sentence, followed by a haiku.

The final section, “The Stone Leeks,” is comprised of 10 haibun. One of my favourites is “All’s Right on the Night” about “the strange daytime of theatre,” with its evocations of props, costumes, scenery and the backstage labyrinth of stairs and passageways. A couple of haibun in this section bring the reader up-to-date with Jones’ reminiscences of surgery and the seaside town of Llandudno where the sick and elderly go to take the air and recuperate, as in this excerpt from “Costa Geriatrica”:

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Sun and sky
a bright and breezy
way to go

Here in the sixth century Saint Tudno built his rough stone oratory for ascetic prayer, and gave his name to Llandudno. It is now a genteel resort, where the Grand, the Imperial, the Hydro, the King George and many more stand carefully preserved in pastel stucco.

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“BOOTS” and “OSTLER”
bell pushes
which no longer work

However, the grim trio of sickness, old age and death are still muffled by deep pile carpets and the relentless keeping-up-of appearances

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Expensive and well-cut
how they hang
on these poor wasted clothes horses

The final haibun in this wonderful collection is “The Project”—the author, preparing for his own wake, reminisces about projects he worked on throughout his life and comes to the conclusion—

I laugh at my own funeral oration, so solemnly intoned and recorded when a precocious forty year old. Poking charred diaries. A lifetime of stories told to myself, one as good as another. Knock, knock. Is there anyone there?

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. Old Old summer house
settling out of true
to how it needs to be

Finally, the sending out of invitations to the Graceful Exit Party. From that celebratory wake I alone shall depart sober. And, on the back door, hammer the bottom line of a closed book:

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Winter twilight
cutting timber by the Rheidol
all there is to know

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This is a cunningly contrived, beautifully written and wonderfully readable collection. Not only does it say much about the poet and his roots, but page after page has the type of prose that can only be written by somebody who knows exactly what effects he means to create and exactly how to create them. A writer at the top of his form, in other words.

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by Patricia Prime
Auckland, New Zealand

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

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

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

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

Catherine Mair & Patricia Prime: KETCHUP

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The Canadian poets have arrived at the motel. They've been invited for a pot luck lunch to meet several New Zealand haiku poets.

decorated
with daisies
her summer hat

Conversation piece—the jar of salad dressing turned and examined.

label
on the mayonnaise
"made in Canada"

Sausage rolls with tomato sauce intrigue our guests and they experiment with the "squirt" bottle.

on his plate
a red smear
and flakes of pastry

Having discovered our mutual passion for tennis, we suggest they stay for dinner and watch the men's final. By 2.30 a.m. we're propping our eyelids open with matchsticks.

after five close sets
empty wine bottles
by the back door

by Catherine Mair and Patricia Prime

Katikati, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand

and Auckland, New Zealand

Review of FOUR TELLINGS

Four Tellings: A Trans-Tasman Haibun-Renga by Owen Bullock, Joanna Preston, Jeffrey Harpeng and Beverley George. Post Pressed, Queensland, Australia. 2008
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Reviewed by Patricia Prime

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It has been an experience to read the haibun-renga Four Tellings, which comes on the heels of Quartet, also directed by Jeffrey Harpeng and published by Post Pressed. Cover image, book design and layout are also by Harpeng as they were in the previous publication.

The difference here is that the four poets are from the Southern Hemisphere. The collection came into being as a result of the Haiku Aotearoa 2008 Conference in Christchurch, New Zealand, where the four poets represented met. Two of them, Owen Bullock and Joanna Preston, live and work in New Zealand and two reside in Australia. The poets are of different backgrounds. They are of different ages. They do different jobs. But there are similarities in their writing. They have a background of writing Japanese short forms of poetry; their technique is very similar and their subjects, and what is made of them, echo each other.

Jeffrey Harpeng’s selection makes up an intriguing, moving and impressive body of work. The language is informal and prosaic, often conversational. Harpeng writes flexible prose and haiku with lines that vary between two or three lines. Most of his haibun contain two or three short paragraphs followed by a single haiku. The speaker is predominantly a reflective, conversational one, mulling over memories of saying goodbye to a loved one, writing about a depressed woman, signing the word ‘flower’ for a deaf person and playing with a granddaughter.

Indeed, Harpeng’s haibun are often anecdotes of family life, dealing with relatives and friends. Incidents are recalled, reflected on and brooded over by an intelligent and urbane speaker, full of sympathy with those he speaks of, still involved with them, part of their world. “A sigh full or roses” is an example of this kind of poem. It is an account of a hearing person communicating the sign for flower to a hearing impaired person. Presenting the point of view of a particular figure in a particular world dominates Harpeng’s poems and, the reader assumes, this is Harpeng himself. “Liberation,” for example, is spoken by a man attempting, by reading the prayer on a mani stone, to connect with someone he said goodbye to five years previously. In “Heart Offering” a woman suffering from nervous strain and whose house stands in the grounds of an aged care home, is treated by a doctor with an injection of B12 who hopes “that soon she can cope with public places again.” “Horse Tale” looks into the mind of a grandfather playing with his small granddaughter:

How I listen as my fingers gallop toward my granddaughter, off the table and on out the window.

Outside the almost laughter of a kookaburra, the supernatural quardle of magpies and her answering the “h h h oo” welling from the hearts of the doves.

Owen Bullock contributes four haibun: “Silence,” “Relief,” “Shortest Day” and “Hello, Waihi, I’m home” which centre on personal matters. These are minimalist haibun containing one or two short prose paragraphs followed by a single haiku of two or three lines. “Silence” allows Bullock to evoke and speculate on a relationship for a brief time, but it is something one feels he doesn’t want to peer at too closely. I quote the haibun in its entirety:

I didn’t ask what your perceptions were when we started out, but crowded you with mine. It’s easy to get upset, to feed the smouldering of a self-involved habit.

Today, I feel like beginning again, but don’t know how. Familiar things are attractive and empty.

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barometer
on the post
creepers

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The haibun has in common with others by Bullock a sense of the suggestiveness, the transcendent implications of particular experiences. “Relief” is another poem about a relationship. In it, Bullock says, “I write that you are my finest teacher. You’re more than that: lover and friend. I can consult with you because I trust you.” “Shortest Day” looks wittily at how the speaker enjoys silence, but only certain kinds of silence: “ . . . something I can’t name, that results in peace.” A memory, as in “Hello, Waihi, I’m Home,” prompts reflections on moving to a new home in an area lived in before and, perhaps forming a new relationship, although the speaker is adamant “I long so much to be alone.” The recorded experiences are simply themselves, presented without amplification, but rich in some kind of ambiguous significance.

Moving, domesticity and memories are suitable subjects for Joanna Preston’s haibun, which are one paragraph, one haiku in form. Memories and moving, by their nature, are liable to be elusive, for Preston is fascinated by the transient. She writes of the last day in a house (“Leaving”), the simple act of dishwashing (Meditation”), a memory of growing up on a farm (“Winter”) and her childhood bedroom (“Nylon summer”). Preston’s canvas is unashamedly small scale: moving, rural life, washing up, memories of childhood on a farm. Here is a passage from “Winter”:

Running barefoot across the frost. Reaching the barn, scrambling over the gate. The cuffs of my track pants glittering with crystals of ice, like stars. Like embers. Cobs of dried corn piled high in the back of the barn.

However she points explicitly beyond these limits to a wider world, as we see in “Leaving”:

This new life will be exciting. New country, new chances. An adventure. So why the hell is the sight of the old spare bed – wrapped in plastic and paper, ready to be put in storage – a bed I’ve never even slept I, for christ’s sake – why is its presence in the room making me feel so small? Why am I crying?

Her central concerns may be of transience, but the beauty and pity of things are already of great substance.

Beverley George paints on a larger canvas. While two of her haibun “Ribbons” and “Brown bread and honey” concentrate on family relationships, “Autumn Oaks” is based on a conference she attended and “Matsuyama Footprints” is about a trip to Japan where she also attended a conference. One poem that well represents George’s art is “Autumn Oaks.” We note her largely informal language, the three pithy prose paragraphs, the figure who guides her, the local ambience, the universals, the idea that there’s no money in poetry:

There’s no money in poetry, she says above my rumbling wheels, not a liveable wage anyway. Think I’ll go back to my old job, life model, part-time.”

“Ribbons” employs a similar conversational tone. It also uses the moment, the individual discrete experience of death, the child’s way of dealing with grief to point the way people cope with tragedy. “Matsuyama Footprints” focuses on foreign travel. The Asian landscape is deftly woven into the text: pavilion, sculptures, tatami mat, cheery blossom, pathside vendors. The speaker describes the discomfort of the Westerners in the meeting room with her usual wit and wisdom:

They sink down gracefully on cushions on tatami at low tables around four walls. As Westerners from diverse countries, we do our best to emulate them, divert our attention.

“Brown bread and honey” offers a picture of the poet as a child visiting her grandparents on their farm. It is a remarkable evocation of childhood, the love of and for grandparents, and finally, the death of her grandmother. The poem is utterly contemporary and utterly traditional at the same time. George shows herself to be truly perspicacious in her vision of the complexity and diversity of human relationships and coming to terms with grief.

There is plenty of drama inherent in both the narrative and settings of these haibun. Many elements and ideas will resonate with readers. Despite the tension created by the poems, the most memorable moments are when the speakers reveal their vulnerability and humanity. This haibun-renga is representative of a kind of strong poetry that is both contemporary and traditional, a personal lyric that can light up the material and emotional world, and give it a powerful resonance.

by Patricia Prime
Auckland, New Zealand

Patricia Prime: THE CARDBOARD SUITCASE

Click of the Box Brownie. In the photo I clutch Mum with one hand; my other holds a toy dog on wheels.

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As if it were yesterday, I see Dad in his khaki uniform, shouldering his kit bag as he waves and turns the corner. Mum, back in the kitchen, dissolves in tears when she discovers his sugar ration lying on the table.

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She's waving goodbye to us a short time later. We're on the train with hundreds of other children for evacuation to the Midlands for the duration of the bombing. In my hands a cardboard suitcase and gas mask . . .

out of the dark
the mournful sound
of a train whistle—
the smell of black smoke
permeates the carriage

the suddenness
of being alone
and no-one to care
a guard comforts me
with a sticky toffee

standing
over a puddle
rainbowed with oil
I make a wish
to see mum again

by Patricia Prime

Auckland, New Zealand
first published in Kokako 9, Sept. 2008

Patricia Prime: LIVE FROM DOWNUNDER

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The Note-taking Habit

Assistant Editor: Patricia Prime

I have been turning the pages of a thick octavo notebook tied with rubber bands and stuffed with photos, rail tickets and other odds and ends. I wrote in it nearly twenty years ago. I was then on a trip to China and Tibet for six weeks with a friend. At one end of the book are notes on various sites we visited: some of these were off the beaten tourist track. My friend and I were both early childhood teachers and our interests lay in seeing various places of education from pre-school to university. At the other end of the book are haiku.

When we returned from our trip my friend published a book of haiku called Caterpillar. I submitted several of my haiku to various journals. The notes lay dormant for several years until we decided to form our notes into haibun which we self-published in booklet form, together with tanka and haiku.

It is only now that I have re-read the notes for the haibun that follows. Had the notes been written last week I would rewrite them now to make the account less clumsy, stilted and repetitive. But since it was written long ago and in order to safeguard the immediacy of the record, I write it word-for-word with all its infelicities.
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Escape

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We are caught for a moment on this narrow rim of road overlooking the Li River. The sheer karst peaks are sewn with saplings, slender roots and half-grown bushes. Weathered cliff faces and rock surfaces are striated in various shades of colour. The wide green waterway idles below.

It is so still, you say, so still—the only moving thing a fisherman’s boat way down there; yet seeing straight away how far from true this is: everything moves, trapped with the two of us in a ripe giddiness of heat which shakes the mountains until they cheat reality. They threaten to collapse and in their downfall fling themselves upon their images floating in the Li—for it already holds them in its sway, rooted in the current.

reflecting river—
mountains shiver
In broad sunlight

And look, see how the river even now will not allow these ancient rocks one moment of repose as our guide tells us the legendary stories behind them. Most are magical and love stories. They have imaginative names that he translates as Elephant Trunk Hill, Pagoda Hill, The Emperor’s Seat and The Three Princesses.

The fisherman releases his cormorant into the water where it dives for fish. When the bird catches a fish it returns to the boat and the fisherman removes the fish from its throat. The secret is that the fisherman places a cord around the bird’s neck to keep the bird from swallowing the fish. When the fisherman stoops to release the fish, the vast pink-veined karst shudders and shakes in the silent river.

the long shadow
of a cormorant’s neck
among reeds

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Once these jottings have begun to find their way into sentences, no matter how crude, the mind can find a purchase and trace patterns that gather shape. There’s a long way from the words in a notebook to the shaping of a poem, and thinking about them brings a perception that emerges involuntarily, despite the conscious effort to bring them to completion. They emerge from the untidy notebook where so many images have been stored until they reach the finality of the poem.

The words do not take me back to the reason I made the entry, but back to the felt experience, whatever it was. This is important, for I imagine the significance of the event. It is the instant I catch in a notebook, not the comment, not the thoughts. And this is what I hope to achieve in writing haibun, whether these are of childhood memories, travel experiences, nature, looking at paintings, meeting unusual people or writing about relationships.

by Patricia Prime
Auckland, New Zealand

Catherine Mair & Patricia Prime: PURPLE IRISES

A daughter-in-law brings spring flowers for us to take to the rest home.

wrapped in damp tissue
three purple irises
on her night stand

Molly's in the exercise room. When she's ready, I help her to the lounge where the other ladies are having morning tea. "I'll go and fetch your tea," I say. The tea trolley is parked outside Molly's door. "Who's it for?" questions the officious tea lady. "It's for Molly. She's in the lounge. May I please have a cup for me and my friend?" "No, you can't. It's for residents only." I return with the solitary cup. Along comes another carer. "What no tea for you? I'll get you some." She returns a few minutes later with two cups of tea and a ginger slice.

"I'm glad it didn't land on you!" The pot plant bursts like a bomb at the feet of an elderly woman. "What's that strange sound?" asks a lady beside me. "It's the carer slapping a cushion to remove the dirt," I reply. I ask her how long she's been living in the rest home. "I only come for a day now and again. I've a huge family: two daughters and five sons to look after me." She reminisces about life on the farm, bringing up two babies while her husband served in Egypt. Her long-term memory is excellent.

The woman with the Dutch accent asks, "What's your name?" She says she has Parkinson's and finds it difficult to talk. She says how thick her tongue feels, like a barrier in her mouth. I'm thankful that although I was diagnosed with the same illness sixteen years ago my tongue is not affected.

Some instinct makes me examine Molly's arm. Her left forearm is mottled with bruising. I check her right arm. The bruising is worse and there's an ugly haematoma between her wrist and elbow.

I summon a nurse, who brings in the night book. She reads the treatment Molly received the previous evening. "Her arm was bandaged and it should be bandaged now," she says. "I'll do it straight away. She will need to see the doctor later on." Gently she applies a pressure bandage to the bruising and straps up Molly's forearm.

bruises on her arm
more startling
than one on mine

As we leave the rest home I notice that the croquet lawn is covered with cherry blossoms.

in spite of the gale
croquet players
line up balls and hoops
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by Catherine Mair and Patricia Prime
Katikati, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand
and Auckland, New Zealand

Catherine Mair & Patricia Prime: ENCOUNTER

Outside the village store we are accosted by two Maori men. One is quite handsome with a facial tattoo and hair in a topknot. He wears knee-high boots and a black leather coat though it is sweltering. His face is surly and his eyes dart between me and my friend. The other man is slim and has several teeth missing. He is friendly.

“Where youse from?” he asks. We reply, “Auckland and Katikati.” “Gee, I thought youse were foreigners.” “No, we’re touring the East Cape, heading towards Gisbourne,” I tell him. “Foreigners! No, we’re true blue kiwis,” asserts my friend Catherine, launching into a haka stance with outstretched arms, quivering fingers and lolling tongue. “Ka mate, ka mate,” she chants. “Yikes!” he says, leaping backwards. Then he decides he’d like Catherine for his girlfriend.

exiting the store
Selwyn and Merv
offer to sell her

As usual, I remain composed in the face of this tomfoolery.

on the doorstep
our groceries
in a cardboard box

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

WHAT MAKES EVE DIFFERENT?

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Patricia Prime Interviews Miriam Sagan

Miriam Sagan was born in Manhattan, raised in New Jersey, and educated in Boston. She holds a B.A. with honors from Harvard University and an M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University. She settled in Santa Fe in 1984.

Sagan is the author of over twenty books. Her most recent is a memoir, Searching for a Mustard Seed: A Young Widow’s Unconventional Story (Quality Words in Print, 2004. Winner Best Memoir from Independent Publishers, 2004). Her poetry includes Rag Trade (La Alameda, 2004). The Widow’s Coat (Ahsahta Press, 1999), The Art of Love (La Alameda Press, 1994). True Body (Parallax Press, 1991) and Aegean Doorway (Zephyr, 1984). Her published novel is Coastal Lives (Center Press, 1991). With Sharon Niederman, she is the editor of New Mexico Poetry Renaissance (Red Crane, 1994): winner of the Border Regional Library Association Award and Honorable Mention Benjamin Franklin Award, and with Joan Loddhe of Another Desert: The Jewish Poetry of New Mexico (Sherman Asher, 1998). She and her late husband Robert Winson wrote Dirty Laundry: 100 Days in a Zen Monastery, a joint diary (La Alameda, 1987; New World Library, 1999). She is the author of Unbroken Line: Writing in the Lineage of Poetry (Sherman Asher, 1999) which Robert Creeley called “A work of quiet compassion and great heart.” Sagan is also the author of four juvenile nonfiction books, including Tracing our Jewish Roots (John Muir). Her work has appeared internationally in 200 magazines. She writes book columns for both the Santa Fe New Mexican and New Mexico Magazine, and a poetry column for Writer’s Digest.

Sagan, an Assistant Professor, runs the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College, and has taught at the College of Santa Fe, University of New Mexico, Taos Institute of the Arts, Aspen Writer’s Conference, around the country, and online for writers.com and UCLA Extension. She has held residency grants at Yaddo and MacDowell, and is the recipient of a grant from The Barbara Deming Foundation for Women and a Lannan Foundation Marfa Residency. She has recently been a writer in residence at Everglades National Park, Petrified Forest National Park, and The Land/An Art Site.

PP: Despite your impressive literary output, your work perhaps is not as well-known as it deserves to be. Could you please outline your background?

MS: I was born in Manhattan, raised in Jersey, have a B.A. from Harvard, M.A. from Boston University. I ran off to San Francisco when I was 26 – probably the smartest thing I ever did. I’ve lived in Santa Fe since 1984 and I founded and direct the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College – which I think of as a natural extension of my early years as a community organizer. I’ve published over twenty books; the most recent is Map of the Lost (University of New Mexico Press).

PP: How did you build your list of authors in the early years of the Santa Fe Poetry Broadside?

MS: Our mandate to ourselves was to put up as many New Mexico poets as possible. That was before many writers were web-savvy and we wanted potential readers to be able to find work by local poets such as Leo Romero. So we begged and nagged for work! And have also expanded into other areas of interest, particularly with guest editors.

PP: What is the hardest thing for you in your job as an editor?

MS: At this point, staying fresh.

PP: I often feel that women writers are in a double-bind. There is that external pressure to succeed as lover, wife, mother and, often, equal work partner. There is also an internalized, self-imposed pressure. How do you cope given this situation?

MS: When my daughter Isabel was born 20 years ago I realized that she came first – just not every minute! This was very helpful. I had rules that my study was an inviolate space – pretty soon I broke these and she had coloring books etc. in there. But it didn’t matter. We survived a hard time, the death of my first husband Robert Winson as a young man. But to be honest I haven’t felt huge conflict. I feel my writing comes from life, and Robert’s death made other people seem even more important. Paradoxically, in the last 13 years I re-married, raised my daughter, and published a dozen books of poetry and memoir – most related to my experience.

PP: What about the notion of the essential female identity which locks women writers into biological determinism?

MS: Yikes! I’ve spent a good part of my 54 years wondering if men and women were essentially the same or different – and I’ve changed my mind a few times! I’m interested in identity – as a woman, a Jew, an American, a baby-boomer – but I’m also interested in something essential that isn’t totally defined by these things.

PP: It seems to me that there is a connection between writing and illnesses like depression, which occurs in many women poets – Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, to name but two. Can writing come out of depression, illness or breaks in relationships?

MS: I think that for the trained poet, writing can come out of anything. I think about Anna Ahkmatova standing outside the prison at the height of the Stalinist purges and the woman behind her saying – can you write about this? She said yes, and wrote her masterpiece “Poem Without A Hero.” I love Sexton’s work and it seems obvious that she used and encouraged her mania to induce creative states – with Plath I sometimes think her writing was the sane part and survived despite her. Of course we’ve all known people who suffered dreadfully and were ill who weren’t artists at all.

PP: Do you think there is an inherent difference between male and female poetry?

MS: No

PP: To return to your own writing – how does the poem originate?

MS: It has been my lifelong practice to write poetry – it is a mixture of observation, image, language, word, and feeling. Then I chase that bit of inspiration as with a butterfly net – and try to get it down.

PP: How much attention do you pay to stylistic elements? In what ways do you work on syntax, phrasings, finding the right words to communicate?

MS: Colette said – “don’t wear yourself out with lying and don’t look for the rare word.” I like this advice! I’m more apt to work from form than syntax – let’s say from syllabics or meter or line length than from searching for the exact words. But I’m afraid I’m a little sloppy.

PP: The imagery you use is often quite complex, full of shifts of perspective. Do you make demands on your readers’ imagination? Is that an important part of your craft for you?

MS: Aah – those leaps are my favorite thing – I think of the poem as a trip or a place – I want to take the reader there – to see what I saw.

PP: Sometimes I find glimpses of humour in your work. How important is humour for you, with regard to your writing?

MS: It is crucial. As a young poet I was very serious. People would complain – you’re so funny – and your writing isn’t! I set about to change that.

PP: How does the editor or prose writer in you get on with the poet? Do you co-exist in harmony or do you consider yourself primarily a poet?

MS: I’ve written a lot of prose. I’ve been a columnist for Writer’s Digest, New Mexico Magazine, The Santa Fe Mexican, and Sage Magazine at The Albuquerque Journal. I love the essay form, and the review, and the constraints of commercial writing – deadlines etc. I think it is just a different muscle. If I feel like writing but don’t feel inspired I’ll tend to work on prose, which lends itself to elbow grease.

PP: Do you tend to compose spontaneously or by applying certain procedures to materials that you have previously written or derived from other sources?

MS: Spontaneously – but I encourage certain situations. For example, I was recently a writer in residence at Petrified Forest National Park. I had two weeks in a little cabin all to myself. Every day I took field trips, walked, identified wildflowers, read, talked to archeologists and paleontologists, etc. I’d go out and “sketch” in words, come home and revise. It was heaven!

PP: Do you go about writing a tanka or haiku sequence with a specific sense of structure or in the knowledge of how it will develop?

MS: Sometimes. It tends to be site specific. For example, in Petrified Forest I wanted a haiku sequence and some connected tanka. In ordinary life it might be more random.

PP: Do you want to say something about what lyric means to you? Is it something musical, song-like, or is it more about the kind of orientation towards its content?

MS: I think of lyric as coming from the Greeks like Sappho – personal, musical, brief, metaphoric. Essentially the heart of poetry that isn’t epic or a long narrative.

PP: Can you say something about your interest in haibun?

MS: I love it and was excited to realize it was an actual form being practiced in English! Of course, I’d read Basho, Issa, the Japanese poetic diaries, etc. I’m very interested in diary and journal writing, and this had a formal approach that intrigued me. Plus I’d always felt poetry and prose could not be combined – and haibun proved the opposite!

PP: Do you think that the reader identifies too often with the speaker of a poem?

MS: Absolutely – or poetry wouldn’t work. On re-reading your question, is it too much? Well, I think not – how else to enter the poem?

PP: Do you feel that women bring something to the genre that men do not?

MS: Well, of course the specifics of experience as women. And our ancestors in tanka, haibun, etc. are often women. But in today’s society in the US where women and men have close to identical educations – no “women’s language” or boys learning Greek and Latin and girls not – I think the differences would be more individual and less sweeping.

PP: Do you feel that men dominate the genre by virtue of editorial entrenchment or bias?

MS: I hope not – and I’m not aware of the bias – but that isn’t to say it might not be there.

PP: What do you think of the idea that research stimulates an incident-set that may later be used in a poem?

MS: I really agree – I love research – but it might be more poetic than hyper-intellectual. I read a huge amount of non-fiction particularly about history, sociology, biology and it is a big influence.

PP: Do you think it may create a number of possibilities that you then think about transforming in certain ways?

MS: Or even that knowledge re-shapes the way I experience things – deepens perception.

PP: What is the role of revision in your work? Do you spend a lot of time working on a piece or is it a swift process and then you re-work things?

MS: I’m fast. As a young writer I’d do about 20-25 revisions, it was a learning curve. Now I do just a few. I tend to toss something that isn’t working rather than over-revise.

PP: You are very active in the literary scene. Do you still meet other poets on a regular basis?

MS: Well, my life is full of poets and poetry. I’m just back from the STIR Festival in Albuquerque which was several days of stellar poetry – I saw a lot of old friends. And of course my students are poets in the making.

PP: How would you characterize the literary scene in the USA at the moment?

MS: I’ll just go with New Mexico – it is vibrant and inclusive here. Taos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Las Cruces are all dynamic hubs with all kinds of poets – from slam to academic. Nationally things may be more separate – slam poets don’t dine with language school folks. But luckily things are integrated here

PP: It would be interesting to learn more about your method of working. Is there a strict time scheme you stick to when writing?

MS: I’m production oriented. My goal is to write 5 poems a month – a bit of a stretch. If I’m behind I really push it!

PP: Can you identify some poets who have inspired you?

MS: My demi-gods include Neruda, Lorca, Machado, Ahkmatova, Yosano Akiko, Allen Ginsberg. In terms of American haiku writers – Elizabeth Searle Lamb, who was a close friend.

PP: What are your literary projects in the foreseeable future?

MS: I’ve been doing some visual work – a poetry installation at The Land/An Art Site in Mountainair, New Mexico. I’ll be doing a gallery installation at their Granite Street site, writing on walls. I’m working with some letterpress printers and collaborating with a photographer as well.

THANKS SO MUCH – THIS WAS FUN!