HCSHR 2:1: Natalia L. Rudychev's Simple Gifts

Natalia L. Rudychev, Simple Gifts: Haiku. Winchester VA: Red Moon Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-947271-24-1. 80 pages, 4.25" x 6.5", 15$US. redmoonpress.com

Writing reviews of women’s haiku fills me with temerity.  With brilliant historical antecedents, there can be no doubt that women hold their own place in the development of the form and its relatives, and the haiku of Natalia Rudychev shows as well as anyone’s how uniquely a feminine brush defines the forms.  In responding to her work, I have put aside the long list of awards and achievements and ignored her impressive publishing history, to focus on the pieces themselves.

Rudychev’s work delights in the power of the turn in haiku.  Like a dancer, she executes a perfect curve, then leaps into the third line in a way uniquely hers.  She plays with synaesthesia: “a sunbeam glides…/ breathing echo”; with ambiguous sexuality as in “egg fight”; and with sameness as in narcissus leaning to his shadow and blossoms touching each other in a light wind.  She imbues the inanimate with life: “sunlight/ fills the mailbox.” Her images are full of movement; they are light and childlike.  Light and air flicker throughout:  “the wind mingled our breaths” and “we dress in summer wind.”

Rudychev seeks to master silence repeatedly rehearsed in bubbles of air or a winter sunset behind a half-finished bottle of wine.  Showing a deep understanding of music and haiku in this quest, she is pioneering, finding her way despite her own line, “I wish I were ready.”  She finds joy in whatever source, in

a stump in spring
the scent of cherry
strong as ever

or in “tears of joy/ raindrops run up the window.” She plays happily outdoors, season by season:

in the raw
the maple
is sweet on spring.

There is some unevenness in the collection:  a few too many sunbeams, metaphors (“as if it is home”) that weaken, some iffy personifications and a few one-liners that don’t work well, though “the core of being a flower colours sunlight” does.  You can look for plums easily in this work, such as on pages 24 and 29, the senryu on page 51 (see for yourself!).  Some are so ripe they inspire response.  A haiku about a gull shifting between reflection and shadow caused me to reread it often enough that it elicited another from me about a heron stabbing at its reflection at the tide line. 

That quality of stopping the reader for a reread is strong in Simple Gifts. Each reread up to three (one for each line) offers rewards.  There is seriousness as well as playfulness in “heat wave/ the curve/ of cicada song,” and in “a shoot gets out/ of the shoe-print.”  This is a promising poetess already pretty accomplished.

review by Sandra Stephenson