HCSHR 5:05 – Claude Rodrigue, Tanbun from Old Deer House

 

HCSHR 5:05 – Claude Rodrigue, Tanbun from Old Deer House. with a foreword by Larry Kimmel. Catkin Press, 2019. 978-1-928163-30-5. 52 pages. $13 including postage. <clauderodrigue2015haiku@gmail.com>

review by Maxianne Berger

Recently I received an email from a friend who was giving a poetry-writing workshop. One of the poets had submitted a “tanka” which was way too wordy, and what did I advise.

It happens that I was engaged in my initial reading of Claude Rodrigue’s Tanbun from Old Deer House and so knew immediately what to say. As Larry Kimmel explains in his foreword, recalling the beginnings of the tanbun genre from a tanka: “I found there was still a bit more that I felt important to the event, for which I hadn’t enough room in tanka’s 31 syllable limit.”

I told my friend to suggest a tanbun: the overloaded first two lines could be slightly expanded and presented as poetic prose; the final three lines, it happens, were already a shift, and already incorporated a juxtaposition.

I don’t mean to be reductive regarding what a tanbun is, but rather would like to suggest the extra depth such a brief haibun enables, and so present a few examples from Rodrigue’s travel diary of a visit to Scotland.

Consider this haiku.

along
the railroad to Edinburgh
daffodils

A true evocation in the spirit of shasei, yet see how the prose that precedes the poem peacefully extends the experienced moment.

The train was cozy. Nobody else was seated in our section, so we had a lot of room for the next four hours.

The experience of viewing these daffodils feels almost hypnotic.

Many of Rodrigue’s tanbun in this collection involve time in another way: as history. As such, reveries superimpose themselves on the here and now.

Beside a 500 year old castle donjon keep, I imagined myself as a knight for my lady.

broken stones
in the large courtyard
only bees

The contrast is delicious, and representative of the collection. Claude Rodrigue’s poems are as easy to appreciate as they are to read.

Maxianne Berger
April, 2022

*****

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