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The World Spins Darkly: Andrew Detheridge Hub Editions ISBN 1-903746-15-9 price £5 available through Bookshops; The BHS Bookshop c/o David Cobb, Sinodun, Shalford, Essex CM7 5HN; Andrew Detheridge, 8 High Haden Road, Haden Hill, Cradley Heath, West Midlands B64 7PG

This A6 book of 122 haiku and senryu is yet another in a growing list of titles neatly and unpretentiously produced under the HUB imprint. It is a carefully considered and designed layout, two poems to a page, the placement balanced with the cover page spacing.

The first line you read is the world spins darkly. Readers interpret differently. My mental translation was of a rather ominous place, lacking predetermined design, blind, and somewhat cruel. The poem is: the world spins darkly/as he grips the donkey’s tail/tightly in his fingers an altogether different, and more complex, poem. A child’s game, the blindfolded and rapidly turned person is made dysfunctional in relation to ‘everyday’ reality. Put into a new reality of sensory deprivation, the disorientation can be disturbing, unbalancing, even frightening. The contrasts and innuendoes make a more sinister world than my initial understanding gave me. It is,  after all, only a game,  in which there is a willing submission to a scary discomfort because, ultimately, there is safety and amusement of the others taking part. It is that sort of book!

It is also a book exuding a warm and narcissistic familiarity, a feeling of personal ownership. Not that you have actually written them,  but you might have. As reader, there is closeness, recognition and, consequently, a high degree of empathy.  They are in that cosy broad band to which many haijin aspire, based on previous reading, understanding the strictures of others. Perhaps it reveals that, as a human group living in a quite well defined and structured society and, within that, a fairly fixed social range and level of experience and awareness, we will, inevitably, share similar experience ‘moments’ and, so, subject matter, structures and  language formations. This is in not a criticism, more an observation of fact; an indicator of a trend in any genre that tends to feed off itself or its near neighbours. It is this narcissistic aspect which makes us approve of what we read, especially those poems with which we seem to have an affinity; content, free  form, where the word flow demands line 2 not the longest, content, occasional application of punctuation, use of kireji, content, desk haiku, 3-1ine sentence, some subtle and other more obvious image juxtaposition and contrast, using autobiographical events but lacking the courage to admit it, or sensibly ‘breaking a rule’, content.

thickening silence,
as he nears the heart
of the forest

in the comer shop -
the smell
of freshly uprooted vegetables

the look on your face
as you phone in sick for work
and come back to bed

skimming stones -
silence spills over the edge
of the morning

the limp tide
washes up
a condom

only noticing,
months after the funeral
the stain on his tie

New Year's day -
spray paint barely dry
on the church door

the tree's shadow
inches across his page
as he snoozes

quiet enough
to hear the squirrel
change his grip

Then, for touching pathos, how about: after the phone call / you put the kettle on / to do something useful; or, for amazement and unplanned learning for schoolgirls:  hyena’s erection -  twenty-seven schoolgirls / stand transfixed  - the event’s voyeur is able to elongate time in such a stretched way as to be sure there are 27 schoolgirls; no more, no less. Well, wouldn’t it transfix you, too? Curl up with this surprisingly warm and sensitive book, a rich example of accepted haiku/senryu wisdom.  Like a more perfecting mirror, it will appeal to the majority of upwardly aspiring poets of the genre - and others.