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As
readers, we tend to think of poets either as traditional
or experimental, either as striving to preserve the history
and identity of poetry or to push art towards new forms
and discoveries. Most poets fall primarily into one group
or the other, though others defy easy categorizations. In
which camp, for example, would one place the Japanese poet
Seishi Yamaguchi, who believed deeply in the 5–7–5
syllable structure and season word, but who also opened
haiku to modernism? Stone Circles is, like Seishi’s
haiku, a work that is both traditional and experimental.
It points the haibun towards both the past and future, and
haiku poets of all persuasions will find much to ponder
in its pages.
The
traditional aspect of the book appears in the suites of
travel haibun, which recall Bashô’s journeys,
especially his shorter travelogues. Bashô tended to
arrange his travels around visits to important cultural
or religious sites, and in a similar spirit Jones journeys
throughout Britain to explore, among other things, local
myths associated with stone ruins, monasteries that were
ransacked by the Vikings, and holy sites consecrated by
Catholic saints. On one journey she visits a circle of stones
that, according to legend, was formed when a Catholic priest
asked the Lord to rid him of a drunken wedding party. On
another she makes a traditional pilgrimage to St. Melangell’s
Healing Centre to find that the yew trees, surprisingly,
“go on offering shelter to whoever comes—faith
or no faith.” At the end of one of her travels Jones
ponders the meaning of tradition when she asks herself “what’s
in it for us moderns, then?” Her answer is the following
haiku:
a
power of stillness—
stone tree
in a cloud of midges
This
view of the past as a silent yet abiding aspect of our lives
is one of the stronger statements that I have read in an
English-language haibun.
However,
the heart of the collection lies in the five “Songs
of Old Age,” which won the Noboyuki Yuasa International
Haibun Contest in 2003. Here Jones unveils the experimental
side of her art by imagining the last days of an old woman
who is fully conscious of her approaching death. The prose
parts of the haibun are written as streams-of-consciousness,
and they show the old woman’s combination of vitality
and weariness:
what
was I saying o yes the message this is it yes at least
I hope it is but I can’t be sure of anything these
days the words slip and twist like eels—bright and
dark and shiny—rose and yellow and eau de nil I
can’t explain the colours of thought
The
haiku, however, are traditional and help to anchor the woman’s
restless thoughts:
old
grey cat and I
sharing a can of sardines
he winks I wink back
I
was not convinced by the stream-of-consciousness, which
I found to be more abstract and less engaging than, say,
that of James Joyce—this in spite of wonderful lines
like “I can’t explain the colours of thought.”
Yet the sequence does break new ground, raising the possibility
that other literary techniques, whether traditional or experimental,
will increasingly shape the prose sections of our haibun.
This
collection is not without its faults. North American poets
would have pruned a good number of the haiku, for example,
and the haibun are far more memorable than the sections
of poetry. Yet, as I read through Stone Circles,
a small voice inside of my head kept whispering, “This
is important.” I can’t imagine a serious writer
of haibun who would not want to have this book lying on
his or her bookshelf within easy reach.
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