This
collection is almost too quiet to write about. No flashy
techniques, unless you count adescriptionofacrowdedelevator,
or an amusing sudden use of a one-line poem in a book of
three-liners to tell of the spread through some woods of
a Native Plant Society, or
on
top of everything
rain
Most
of the pieces are haiku or senryu (which I can't tell, really,
from the haiku) of eight to ten syllables, a handful of
which have a prose commentary attached. The subjects are
almost all quotidian, wryly observed, such as a son's practicing
parallel parking, memories old sleeping bags inspire, turning
off a television set, pool toys . . .;
a
child's art
the tulips tower
over everything
Perhaps
my favorite haiku here, if the one I just quoted isn't,
is (appropriately) the very first:
May
morning
the door opens
before I knock
Let
me note that I consider this haiku to contain what I call
a "juxtaphor" That's an image next to, or close
to, another image to which it is not explicitly equated
but for which it it is clearly a metaphor, in this case
"the door," which is an implicit metaphor for
the particular "May morning" the poem speaks of.
What brighter way to sneak around the traditional taboo
against metaphorical language in haiku to celebrate the
welcomingness certain rare days are filled with?!
Stevenson
isn't all Nature-centered lyrical moments. A broken marriage
darkens several of his pieces, though never defeating his
sense of humor. For instance:
Father's
Day
she tells me
I'm not the father
Many,
I imagine, would term this a senryu, but I find it deeper
than poems I consider senryu. A similar strain of concerns
that are almost soap operatic as opposed to outdoor imbues
the following:
three
times I've said
"your husband . . . "
now we can just talk
Having
been entirely complimentary to this point, let me balance
things a little with a grumble about a pet haiku peeve of
mine, the use of dangling participles, or the equivalent.
Stevenson rarely does it in this book, and only does it
annoyingly once:
engrossed
in work
the snow
begins to stick
The
problem is that I want to imagine the snow's being engrossed
in work and can't. I wouldn't consider this poem a dud,
even left as is in spite of my BigTime Insights. It's about
the only one of Stevenson’s efforts that's at all
flawed. At least twenty of his others are keepers. His book
is well worth adding to any haiku-lover's library.
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