Review Articles
In and Out of Cloud: Helen Robinson
In and Out of Cloud: Helen Robinson 41pp 6 1/2” by 4”, hand-made, every cover individually designed, string-tied, one haiku/tanka to a page £5 post paid from the author, Flat 4, 4 Sunnyside, Liverpool, L8 3TD
As she was about to conduct a group of junior schoolchildren around an exhibition of contemporary paintings, the art gallery guide asked them what they looked for when they stood in front of a picture. The ensuing silence was broken by the nun who was in charge of the group suggesting they might well look for ‘beauty, upliftment’. However, the guide dismissed this notion by refraining from comment on it and went on to say something like: “We don’t start looking for some quality in particular - we simply gaze at the picture and let it tell us what it wants to say.”
I was one of the children in that group (many, many years ago) who heard that piece of advice which fairly accurately sums up my almost instinctive approach today to haiku (as well as to lots of other things). I am not looking for, or expecting, anything in particular - I wait to see what the haiku says to me; what image it presents to me, what feeling or emotion it inspires, what response it provokes. Only if it arouses no response at all, after several or sometimes many readings, do I consign it to my private bottomless pit of ‘the read and readily forgotten’.
Happily I can say that very few indeed of Helen Robinson’s attractively-presented little collection are possible candidates for that already overcrowded destination.
Between them, these 30 haiku and 10 tanka managed to evoke in me a wide span of responses: pleasure, admiration, recognition, empathy, nostalgia and even, in one case, an acceptable degree of mystification. A few made me pause to ponder over the place of innovation/originality in haiku. This arose from the use of an ‘invented’ verb or unconventional adjective, perhaps an adaptation of a noun, or a visual image used to convey a quality relating to smell. We have the ‘stub end’ of a rainbow, a wind which ‘scours’ leaves, the poet ‘wrapped’ in the sound of rain, mint which has a ‘dark scent’. It is a practice with which I have a love-hate relationship; although it can make for a memorable line and can be exciting and stimulating (especially for the writer), it is not without risk (especially for the reader). The choice of word can be so arresting, so potent, that the rest of the haiku becomes almost irrelevant, merely serving as the vehicle which carries the magical word, the packaging in which it is presented. A more mundane risk, perhaps, is that the word fails to engage fully with the reader because it does not feel 100 per cent ‘right’, perfect, appropriate to the point of being irreplaceable.
Some examples to illustrate my ambivalence. First, half-moon / pale clouds / deckled with silver only half-succeeded with me because (a) I had a somewhat hazy notion of the meaning of ‘deckled’ and decided to look it up (its effectiveness thereby already all but lost) and (b) the term failed to convey (to me) any more vivid a picture than would have been achieved by, say, ‘edged’. Then, although faring rather better, January - / a dark morning / stippled with bird-song nevertheless focussed my attention on ‘stippled’ to the virtual exclusion of all else and I spent a while trying to decide how appropriate or otherwise the word really was. However, no such doubts arose over my third example which, on account of its essential ‘rightness’, more than vindicates the ‘love’ element in my relationship with heterodox word usage:-
a single gull
trapezing
the offshore breeze
There is much else to savour, from the subtly dark undertones of inside old railings / the new railings - /taller, sharper to the irresistible simplicity and charm of rings of water: / the tufted duck / bobbing up somewhere else. And that ‘acceptable degree of mystification’ I mentioned earlier? Well, with this nameless torrent / how its water / flows through me, I can accept the seeming obscurity of its source for the recompense of its emotional power.
The tanka deserve a full-length review of their own. Although I have read at least three of them at different times elsewhere, I feel they have gained from being brought together. Lucid, spare and precise, they are imbued with an essential tenderness and a sort of half-resigned sadness. I found them ‘real’ and moving. Just one example:-
here I am settled
into my winter:
your sunshine would only start
an untimely
flowering
In trying to sum up the overall impression left by this collection, the word that springs to mind (not withstanding the occasional idiosyncratic verb!) is authentic. Verdict: strongly recommended.
Page(s) 60-62
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