HCSHR 6:06 - Amy Losak and Sydell Rosenberg, Wing Strokes Haiku
Amy Losak and Sydell
Rosenberg. Wing Strokes Haiku. 2023. 978-1-639801-0-77. Kelsay Books.
$16.50 US. https://kelsaybooks.com/products/wing-strokes-haiku.
Review by Pearl Pirie
Wing Strokes Haiku is a collaboration of mother and daughter, in a modern asynchronous sense. Mother, Sydell Rosenberg, died some years ago, in 1996. Sydell was a charter member of the Haiku Society of America in 1968. She wrote and published her work for three decades, including being chosen for classic texts such as The Haiku Handbook and The Haiku Anthology.
Daughter, Amy Losak, has recently explored haiku and has begun to publish. In this Wing Strokes Haiku, she has brought her poems to sit with her mothers in a relationship similar to illustrations paired with poems, neither originating with the other but complementary in subject or energy.
The cover, which is flush of pigeons, sets up the text themed by wings, flight, the space of air between landings. The poems are made in tribute to her mother’s legacy. It is a good practice for none of us to forget our foremothers. How do we cultivate connection to our past? What better application for mono no aware, roughly translates as "the beauty of dying things" or "the beauty of transient things" than to collaborate on ephemeral flight with someone long flown.
The pairing acts as a flashback in a sense, with the mother’s poems being wordy by today’s standard, adhering to 5-7-5 and the daughter’s tending to cap out at around 9 syllables, all in.
Interestingly Syd used this expectation in form (p. 28 below) to use white space in a poem and hold us for a few beats in L2,
hummingbird’s wings
defying
the camera ~SR
In context set up of 5-7-5 it leverages its own habit to mark time in a wry way.
Funnily enough Amy Losak gave me resolution in a way. A poem I’ve been poking at for twenty years, she properly nailed, p. 19,
bathroom cleaning
a dirt speck
sprouts legs ~AL
Good, someone has done it and I no longer have it. This poem above is set on the page complementary to,
airless summer days
iridescence the silver
throat
of my tea kettle ~SR
We can see where haiku came from. Perhaps as with life itself, years ago we used to try to fit in so much and now we can get away with less.
The poems, older and
fresher, both use more gerunds than one could expect.
For example, p. 21,
sodden Saturday...
worms
curling into letters
on a sidewalk square ~AL
Would there be a loss if it were smaller?
sodden...
worms curl
into letters
on sidewalks
That said, the poems have a long list of previously published places, a who’s who of where including Akitsu Quarterly to Hedgerow and The Heron’s Nest to Under the Basho.
They are lovely poems over the 36-page chapbook. The closing pair are these by Syd, p. 32
hazy summer day
only yellow
school buses
and white butterflies
~SR
feathers fall mutely
to the
bottom of a cage
like white rose petals
~SR
The white like death, a closure and ending of beauty. The bird unseen presumably still ready to fly once the door opens.
Losak has also
shepherded into print two other of her mother's books.
To buy this one:
• https://kelsaybooks.com/products/wing-strokes-haiku
*****
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