To
Hear the Rain is the latest addition to the Goodrich
Masters Series published by Brooks Books, which gathers
the life work of top haiku poets and presents the collections
in attractive hardcover volumes. The result in this case
is a handsome book that would be the envy of most mainstream
poets. The cover shows a beautiful photo of a lily-covered
pond, and inside, surrounding the 108 pages of poems, is
an authors preface, a second preface by Christopher
Herold, an authors biography, and an excerpt from
an interview with Peggy Lyles about haiku craft and aesthetics.
The haiku themselves are printed one or two to a page, making
it possible to savor the assembled work of one of our top
haiku poets.
It
was no surprise to me that Peggy Lyles merited such lavish
treatment. I have long admired her work as it has appeared
in various anthologies and journals. For years the following,
from Modern Haiku 13.2 (1982), has been among my favorite
English-language haiku:
tea
fragrance
from an empty cup . . .
the thin winter moon |
The
unusual yet fitting combination of images, and the way that
they bleed into one another (a quality that Bashô
called nioi, or the fragrance of one image infiltrating
another) seemed to open up new possibilities for the form.
Still, it is hard to follow the career of a poet solely
through journals, so it was welcome to have the chance to
read so many of the authors haiku at once.
The haiku in this collection were selected from over twenty
years worth of work, and they reveal a poet who is
completely at home in English-language haiku aesthetics
as they have emerged over the last thirty years. Lyless
preface, in fact, reads like a commonplace book of catch-phrases
that will be familiar to anyone who follows haiku:
Abstractions
cloak perceptions and dull communications about real things
. . . Brief and immediate, [haiku] compress significant
observations, experiences, and insights into images that
engage the senses and feelings. I think of them as being
open-ended and open-handed poems, capable of receiving,
being, and giving all at once. Expressed in simple language,
they invite the reader to participate as co-creator. Sometimes
they leap from heart to heart.
The emphasis on feeling over abstraction, the belief in
the open-endedness of the form, and the insistence on simple
language have been a staple of every discussion of the haiku
for the past twenty years. Later Lyles writes that the haiku
is a breath-length poem that avoids metaphors and other
tropes. Only the authors sincerity keeps the preface
from sliding into cliché. Those who view the haiku
as an experimental or avant-garde form will be disappointed
in these statements, and even I was surprised that such
an accomplished poet had so completely accepted the aesthetic
theories created by others.
Within
these boundaries, however, Lyles has produced a remarkable
number of excellent haiku. In a way her work reveals the
value of the current approach to haiku, and of how much
can be accomplished within it. Technically, the poems break
little new ground, but they struck me as being consistently
elegant and polished. Thematically, Lyless work tends
to fall into several broad categories that she has revisited
over the years. To Hear the Rain contains many haiku about
family, with an emphasis on the continuity between generations:
family
graveyard
a boy finds his middle name
on the oldest stone |
To
me the most moving of these poems were on her childrens
illnesses, which created a dramatic tension that is rare
in haiku. Other poems provide what T.S. Eliot would have
called an objective correlative," an image that
portrays and deepens a psychological state at a pregnant
moment:
sweet
peas
tremble on the trellis
the brides I will |
As
far as I am aware, only a few haiku poets have used their
art as an exploration of psychology in this way (Alexis
Rotella is another), though this is a promising vein for
haiku poets to explore. Other haiku reaffirm the authors
Christian faith, almost always using the image of light
to symbolize the entrance of a divine element into the mundane
world:
cathedral
garden
cardinals in the birdbath
scatter drops of light |
Her
use of this image is so persistent that I read many of the
nature poems that mention light as religious parables, which
enriched them immensely.
I
hope that I have said enough to recommend this volume to
both new and experienced poetsthis book deserves to
be celebrated as an event in the haiku community. Yet, because
it failed to meet all of my expectations for the haiku,
the work left me feeling unsatisfied. The language used
in To Hear the Rain is often too simpleI felt that
I was reading the most common word rather than the right
one. The themes, too, seemed to me a shade too comforting:
no mainstream poet would portray psychological states with
so little irony, or would celebrate a religious faith with
so few doubts. The absences of a history other than the
authors personal history, and of an overarching glance
at society and culture, and of an acknowledgement of a debt
to past literature, are also glaring. In what they do, these
haiku are beyond reproach; the question is whether they
take enough chances and explore enough facets of experience
to satisfy every reader.
I
have intended the criticisms of the previous paragraph as
roundabout praise: it shows how much is right with a book
when a reviewer can hold it up to the highest standards
and demand that it do everything well. One final point:
in publishing the Goodrich Masters Series, editor Randy
Brooks deserves credit for raising the profile of haiku.
When the series was begun, it was hailed as a sign that
the haiku in English had come of age. I suspect that there
is still much to be done to elevate our haiku to a level
that can stand a comparison with mainstream poetry. In making
the very best haiku of leading poets available to a broader
public, however, Brooks has done much to promote the form.
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