This
booklet of usually three haiku or senryu on a page is another
of the very well manufactured editions in the Hub Haiku
Series. The first-publication credits include 40 periodicals.
Among the poems that especially attracted my attention were:
moonlit
night
from miles away
howling in the zoo |
cooing
while its feet
around the kilovolts
are curled |
Many-too
many-haiku have been written about birds perched on, usually,
telephone wires, but Ower acutely perceives a different
aspect of this phenomenon. And he adroitly refrains from
inserting "wire" or "line," leaving
it to us to complete the sketch.
Bashô wrote about a firefly's neck in daytime being
red. Ower has:
with
summer morning
luminous
a firefly's wings |
The
"luminous" as the second line acts zeugmatically:
it refers to both morning and the firefly's wings, thus
closely linking the haiku's disparate entities, while simultaneously
each element retains its own nature (remaining morning with
all of morning's characteristics in the first instance,
and wings with their own unique features in the other).
One aspect, though, that I personally prefer to be absent
in haiku is two words that indicate or state the same season.
Firefly is a season word for summer, therefore the "summer"
in the first line is redundant.
We
know that a tsunami (a so-called "tidal wave")
can pile up to a devastating scores of feet as it reaches
shallow coastal waters, while at sea only a modest swell
occurs, even though the tsunami is traveling at tremendous
speed, even attaining that of the top speed of a commercial
airliner.
tsunami
rocking
gently
the
fishing
boats
at
sea |
Prospective
readers of this book may wish to know that in a letter to
me, Ower mentions that this book is his "swan song"
as a poet.
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