HCSHR 5:15 - Mike Montreuil - But I Digress ...

Montreuil, Mike. But I Digress…Covid Lockdown Haibun and Tanka Prose. Catkin Press, 2022. 978-1-928163-42-8, 64 pages. Contact Author: mike58montreuil@gmail.

 

Review by William Scott Galasso

(Author of Rough Cut, Legacy, Saffron Skies)

 

Mike Montreuil is well-known as a writer/editor in French and English. Previously an editor for A Hundred Gourds, he serves as the current editor of the Haiku Canada Review. As editor, two of his haibun collections, The Neighbors are Talking and At the Edge, were short-listed for the Haiku Foundation’s Distinguished Book Awards.

 

His latest work But I Digress…Covid Lockdown Haibun and Tanka Prose, as the subtitles suggest, focus on the last three extraordinary years. The book begins with an introduction by Sonam Chhoki (Cattails) and reference economist Paul Krugman.

 

His first two haibun, “Indeed” and “Desperate Times”, express nostaglia for the days before the word Covid was ever uttered—though Martians killed by a virus is the stuff of an H.G. Wells nightmare scenario. Furthermore, isolation forced together families who, if truth be told, preferred a bit of healthy space between them:

 

in-laws

unwanted

pandemic guests

 

That said, Mike demonstrates that even a disaster may have a few singular merits as presented in “Lockdown” …

 

finishing

what I started

afternoon nap

 

…or, by losing oneself in “Fairy Tales”:

 

shock and awe

a politician

tells the truth

 

We hear echoes throughout the book of John Lennon’s “whatever gets you through the night”. One may cope at times through binge watching TV yes, but one is healed by the sensual gifts of nature as in “Pre (part 1)”:

 

sunset

a doe walks by

the kitchen window

 

Another fine tanka prose piece is “Saturday Night Dance”. Likewise, I enjoyed this haiku from “I Read a Poem Today”:

 

from my window

purple flowers in the rain

 

Yet, Mike reminds us one cannot escape that we are all living in a different world than the one we knew but a scant three years ago:

 

a novel disease

strikes again

love at first sight

 

Indeed, in some ways our lives have become tenuous through the continuance of issues that events have not altered as in “Revelation”…

 

the way money

can destroy

an entire planet

 

… or in “Wishing Upon a Star”:

 

news flash

another school shooting

in a public school

 

In my reading I did detect a couple of miscues. In Sensible, we have the lines:

 

politicians speak

wouldn’t

an honest men be better

 

I assume the third line should read either “an honest man (singular) be better” or “wouldn’t honest men (drop the an) be better”. The second example, in “Damage Control”, the second line reads “bared footed men”, whereas it should read “bare footed men”.

 

Those quibbles aside But I Digress… is a fine collection of haibun and tanka prose that one is likely to read again and again. It is an accessible book that will engage you with its solid imagery, cultural diversity, and the methods we adopt to survive in these perilous times we share. Highly recommended.

 

 

*****

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