HCSHR 6:05 - Jim Kacian, et al , skipping stones

 

Jim Kacian and the Red Moon Editorial Staff, skipping stones: The Red Moon Anthology of English Language Haiku.  Winchester, VA: Red Moon Press, 2023. 978-1-958408-16-2. 202 pages, soft cover 5”x7”, $20 US. redmoonpress.com 

Review by Dave Read

skipping stones: The Red Moon Anthology of English Language Haiku is the latest in the long running series which features the best haiku and haiku-related writing of the year.  With work selected by Jim Kacian and the Red Moon editorial staff, this collection, like its predecessors, is organized into three sections: haiku/senryu, linked forms, and essays. Each section showcases writing in English from authors representing a variety of countries around the world. 

What comprises the best haiku or senryu published each year is subjective.  Indeed, another set of editors may have chosen a completely different group of poems.  While the bulk of the haiku in skipping stones are conventional (exclusively utilizing the common three- and one-line forms), the poems are generally good and effectively represent the haiku predominantly being published in English today.  Furthermore, as expected from a best-of anthology, the haiku contain broad and diverse subject matter. Consider the following poem by India’s Daipayan Nair.

buzzing flies — 

men discuss politics 

in a tea stall (p 64)

Nair has created a humorous senryu.  The sound of the “buzzing flies” is implicitly compared to the men talking about politics, effectively trivializing the content of their discussion.

A darker and somewhat ironic perspective can be found in this one-line haiku by Canada’s Joanne Morcom:

assisted living funeral home calendars (p 63)

Here, I’m reminded of the “product placement” advertising used by some television shows.  That the assisted living facility houses “funeral home calendars” is a cynical way of describing how funeral homes may be targeting potential new “customers”.

Finally, Robert Witmer of Japan provides a haiku about the debilitating effects of cancer:

a silent nightingale in her throat cancer (p 97)

Whether the subject of this poem was a singer or someone who had a melodious speaking voice, “her throat cancer” has subdued her “nightingale”, leaving the poor woman in silence.

Like the haiku and senryu of skipping stones, the linked forms section showcases a wide variety of subject matter. To represent the range of content and mood, I will discuss two haibun: Pris Campbell’s “Casting Couch” (p 106) and Keith Polette’s “Gossip” (p 127).  These poems represent gritty, confessional realism and light, imaginative analogy respectively.

“Casting Couch” is a brutal story of rape in which a young woman is coerced into having sex with a man she is afraid she will otherwise lose from her life. Campbell’s narrator, in first person, describes the coercion and rape and the way it reduced her to being less than human.  She says simply “I’ve become a hole”.  In the very next sentence, she reflects on her subsequent silence: “Who can ever understand how strong a muzzle power is?” (p 107). The concluding haiku is a metaphoric extension of her pain and loneliness: 

bitter rain

a lost dog cries

in the night (p 107)

Keith Polette’s haibun, “Gossip”, on the other hand, is much different in content and tone. After mentioning his great-grandmother was a piano accompanist to old silent movies, Polette’s narrator goes on to implicitly compare the silence of those movies to the silence of trees.  Furthermore, he extends the personification of the trees to include the manner, according to his great-grandmother, in which they gossip about each other.  He augments this comparison by having his prose describe the trees while the haiku discuss humans.  After the first paragraph, where the elms gossip about the sugar maples, “smirking that no respectable tree should wear so much red”, Polette drops the following haiku:

ruby red sunset

the smudge of lipstick 

on a shirt collar

Polette’s haibun is fun and light-hearted, demonstrating the haibun's capacity for humour. 

The volume concludes with five essays each discussing a different facet of haiku.  These pieces showcase a wide range of topics including the push for haiku to be granted UNESCO status, the continuation of 17 syllable haiku in some areas of English literature, the influence of Basho, and war haiku.  The best and most interesting of the five articles however is “Euphony in Haiku” by Brad Bennett. Bennett explores the way the sound and music of haiku can have a positive impact on its meaning, and how techniques not typically associated with haiku, such as rhyme, alliteration, consonance, etc., can be effectively employed in haiku when applied with “‘lightness and balance’” (p 147). As a reader and writer of haiku, I found Bennett’s essay to be both educational and inspiring.  Bennett proves here to be a good teacher and is thoughtful and detailed in the many examples he provides. Take, for example, his analysis of internal rhyme using the following haiku by Barbara Snow:

lifting fog

every leaf tip drips 

sunlight (p 150)

Bennett describes the internal rhyme of the last two words of the second line, “tip drips”, as helping to “replicate the sound of the fog dripping” (p 150).  In this way the sound of the internal rhyme contributes to both the meaning and the musicality of the haiku.

skipping stones is, overall, a good anthology which successfully represents some of the best haiku and haiku-related writing of 2022.  I recommend this book to all readers of haiku and poetry.

 

*****

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