HCSHR 7:2 — designated driver: a selection of haiku, senryu, and small poems by Stanford M. Forrester

 

HCSHR 7:2 — designated driver: a selection of haiku, senryu, and small poems by Stanford M. Forrester (wooden nickel press, windsor: 2023). 66 pages. 5” x 8”. Perfect softbound. ISBN: 978-1-7366037-8-9. $18.95US from www.bottlerocketspress.com

Review by Jerome Berglund

Irreverent Engines: in hot pursuit of enlightenment with sekiro and company

winter rain . . .
     wondering whose god
               is better

No one does polished sections—and tasteful pictorial flourishes!—quite so elegantly as sekiro. He also has a discerning penchant for starting his collections off (in almost Shakespearean foreshadowing fashion) with the perfect didactic summations, in this case entailing a proverb about Zen purloining (‘Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes.’) which Designated Driver commences upon as jumping off point, the delightful spirit of which stretches across the body of work very agreeably! Stanford Forrester has another perceptible knack for infusing remarkable profundity into the layers of complexity dressing otherwise ostensibly comic vignettes, bringing unexpected depth and meditativeness to detail a broad and cheerful brush stroke. He is a master of eliciting the big grin, followed by pondering pauses, at which point a crashing epiphany accompanies the realization of additional depths beneath the opaque surface of each compact treasure in this striking new assembly of fine material.

snowmelt    the scotch tape left     from a paper snowflake

 Few practitioners in English can evoke that subtle gray area of elevated allegorical, weighty riddling profane, charming lusty bawdiness, timeless enigmatic which godfathers like Basho and Issa make look so effortless, yet almost no one except perhaps the rarest Marlene Mountain or Nick Virgilio ever come close to approximating in our language. The poet thus establishes himself as a true successor of note managing such unthinkable feats, in a book also highlighting the author’s more somber and melancholic side, something which may be appreciable elsewhere but is most commonly shrewdly lurking between the lines or below an amicable satiric veneer.

getaway car—
seem to be picking up
a lot of poets

 A joyously flippant coup de maître, Designated Driver – also noteworthy for containing memorable responsive verses, cherita, and demonstrating impressively the author’s especial aptitude for dedicating verses (to such familiar icons as Robert Epstein, Bisshie, Tom Sacramona), highlighting his thoughtful synergy with the larger international community and those many meaningful bonds connecting him with treasured comrades, further tying significantly into the overarching theme and a central sequence involving ideas of ride-sharing and carpooling, explored figuratively and literally – firmly establishes Forrester to be as much of a capable phenom in the delicate mechanics of wabi-sabi and fall kidai as his more familiar cheeky spring and sardonic summer fare, which this book also contains no shortage of fans will be happy to know! An outstanding collection with pieces which will leave an indelible impact upon readers, this is a volume worth adding to ever haikuist’s library!

Review by Jerome Berglund
August 2024

Stanford M. Forrester/sekiro is a past president of the Haiku Society of America and founding editor of bottle rockets: a collection of short verse. Though his work has been published in many journals and anthologies worldwide, he is most proud of his inclusion in Haiku, edited by Peter Washington in the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series (Knopf), American Zen: A Gathering of Poets (Bottom Dog Press), and Haiku in English: The First 100 Years (Norton). In 2001, he was a recipient of the Museum of Haiku Literature Award, given by the Museum of Haiku Literature in Tokyo and the Haiku Society of America. In 2004, he took first seat in the 57^th Annual Bashō Anthology Contest in Ueno, Japan. One of his poems was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2011 and in 2012, he won second place in the Robert Frost International Poetry & Haiku Contest. One poem of his was featured on the premier episode of Japan’s NHK TV show “Haiku Masters”, where he lost to Bashō. In 2018, another of his haiku placed in the second category of the Ito-En Tea Haiku Contest (International Division) out of thousands of entries. Most recently, two of Stanford’s haiku were included in the college textbook Understanding Poetry (2020) by Helen Doss. His Japanese pen name is sekiro (dew on a stone) and he lives in a “fleeting world” that some call Connecticut.

 

Jerome Berglund has published book reviews and essays on poetry and poetics in Fevers of the Mind, Fireflies’ Light, Frogpond, Haiku Canada, Hooghly Review, the Mamba, North of Oxford, Setu, Valley Voices, also frequently exhibits poetry, short stories, plays, and fine art photography in print magazines, online journals, and anthologies.

 

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