HCSHR 2:2: Harriot Wests's Shades of Absence

Harriot West, Shades of Absence: Haibun. Winchester VA: Red Moon Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-947271-22-7. 78 pages, 6" x 9", 15$US. redmoonpress.com

To say I did not enjoy this production of haibun is in part a reflection of the subjects: regret, loss, dissonance, complaint, the burden of heirloom silver. There are moments of great delicacy and skill, but their setting makes them hard to find more than it gives them context.

Haibun is not a genre I use myself, but I can appreciate the success of a few of the pieces, such as one entitled “Abiding.” The poem answers the prose in a different voice, related, like a grandmother answering a child caught up in the same moment but living it differently. The most successful reverse haibun in the book is presented as an epilogue, with two pages of titles in block capitals announcing it.

The decision to offer this book with a heavy scaffolding of titles puzzles me. The titles are accorded such importance that the book becomes a triumvirate of title, prose and poetry. The titles add nothing to my eye except intrusion; they spring up suddenly and too frequent so that they become more important than the writing. The result strengthens the feeling the work is neither here nor there, caught between meeting places of two people unsure where one begins and the other ends, between the meanings of words, trying to force divisions between Wimbledon and lunch.

The poems themselves are unresolved. Some are awkward, hennish, addressing twists of womanhood hard to put into words or legitimize, fussing after something else, “the colors of other rooms.” Though there are some very good pieces, the whole is the fish that got away (with gouges on its back). It seems a voice from south of the border, where “the future bleeds/ into the conditional.” Even the choice of approximate chronological order with flash-backs (to when Mom was alive) is unsettled despite attempts to title and section it into shape.

But a one-liner or two work well, such as: “maybe he says I insert ellipses.” The haiku is more impressive than the tanka, as in “Juxtapositions (pp 18-19), where the urge in the final two lines of the tanka would be better said elsewhere, like after “father’s keychain/ St. Christopher’s face/ worn smooth.” One of my favorites is in “L’Étrangère (p. 41). I like it because it’s a lovely senryu, and because it expresses the feeling of the entire collection.

flurries
if only I fit in
the snow globe

review by Sandra Stephenson