HCSHR 8:4 – A Wild Blue Sky

A Wild Blue Sky by Ben Gaa

Octopus Hearts Press, 2025

ISBN: 979-8-218-79833-8  $12US

review by Sandra Stephenson

This seventh full collection by Ben Gaa, of the podcast series, Haiku Talk, is printed large. It is a small book that feels intimate like a Bible. Between its size, poems, and the sundog on the cover, A Wild Blue Sky is full of delight, and full of subtle echoes easy to miss on first reading:

     snow on snow

     chilli reheats

There’s a freshness in “budding limbs/ of pollywogs” or

     moonrise

     the white tops

     of toadstools

and an understated, innocent incredulity in

     as if it never happened

          and yet

               this old wedding ring

There’s a slow unfolding through “bottleneck blues”, gradual and gradated like the hike up the hill, revealing “first one cow/ then all the cows.” Here one discovers how to turn a beggar into a man, or the resignation of “finding the path less taken/ already taken.”  

He does not avoid the topic of war, but twists to end the book with new love. There’s “the wave of flags/ on the used car lot,” so American; but there’s also “skipping stones/ my father’s father’s father,” which could be a comment on haiku itself, and its international past.

Probably the signature feature of Ben Gaa’s poems is the is/isn’t trick.  It provides layering, pause for thought, dimension, like the “flock of starlings turning/ turning back.”  It is the “here and there/ of a hummingbird,” or 

    air raid sirens

    this is/not

    a drill

Some haiku have double entendres which enrich the work, as in  “pull”, in:

    button accordion

    the pull

    of a fresh pint