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Acorn Book of Contemporary Haiku edited by Lucien Stryk and Kevin Bailey. 173 pages ISBN 0-9534205-2-3, £6, from Acorn Book Company, POBox 191, Tadworth, Surrey KT2O 5YQ

The White-headed Duck is in danger of extinction, not through slaughter, predation or loss of habitat, but through hybridisation. It mates with the closely related Ruddy Duck, producing birds which are neither one nor the other, and thus the population dwindles. A similar danger attends haiku in its encounter with poetry. A poet who shows no appreciation of the subtleties of the form, but who can manage to count to seventeen, dabbles in haiku for light relief, and produces a sterile hybrid: it ain’t haiku and it ain’t poetry.

The Acorn Book of Contemporary Haiku reaches out from the haiku enclave to include familiar names from the wider poetic world: Dannie Abse, Alan Brownjohn, Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Peter Redgrove and more. There is some value in offering short poems which, while not to be confused with haiku, do suggest some traces of haiku influence in their methods and construction. The example by Peter Redgrove on page 138 is one such. But when the poet has made a deliberate attempt at haiku and bungled it, why inflict it on us?

The language is clumsy, the sentiment flippant, the final effect memorable only as an object lesson in how not to do it, even McGough’s doubtless intentional parody. Inclusion on the basis of reputation rather than ability is, from an editorial perspective, absurd. Would the process ever operate in reverse? Would a poet with an acknowledged talent in the specialised genre of haiku thereby be given a place alongside the above-mentioned greats in a broad-based anthology of contemporary verse? I doubt it.

Not only have some names undeservedly got in, but others are under-represented or omitted altogether. Where are the haiku poets? Some of the established talents are included but they form only a minority. Fred Schofield, John Barlow and Jackie Hardy are allotted a mere one poem each; Caroline Gourlay, Cicely Hill, George Marsh and Annie Bachini, to mention just four significant figures in the contemporary British haiku scene, are not represented at all. What mysterious logic is at work? The answer is not hard to find: the anthology is based largely on material from editor Kevin Bailey’s own magazine, HQ. Little active effort appears to have been put into researching the major British and international haiku journals. As for the contribution of Bailey’s co-editor, Lucien Stryk, apart from a short foreword there is no evidence of it. His involvement looks like another case of name-dropping.

There is good stuff here, but it mingles with the bad with no apparent discrimination. If you read Cor van den Heuvel’s The Haiku Anthology (New York, Norton, 1999) you develop a clear sense of haiku as a coherent form. By comparison this Acorn book is garbled:-

These poets are indulging in private fantasy. Rowley over-elaborates and loses us in detail; Russo generalises without justification or application. As readers, what we need is to connect. In the following examples, the Acorn book does offer us the possibility of connection:-

These are haiku: images we can see, hear, touch, smell and taste. An anthology filled with such immediacy and clarity would have been a delight. There is perhaps a strong enough presence of similar examples for potential purchasers of the Acorn Book not to be discouraged. The inclusion of some worthy short poems might additionally tempt readers who are less sympathetic to the actual haiku. But space is wasted on poetic effusions squeezed into the tedium of seventeen syllables. An opportunity has been squandered to establish haiku in the public consciousness as a specific form: a poetry of everyday life; a poetry of sensory experience. Well, let’s end on a positive note with a fine haiku and hope it isn’t an omen:-

first letter of the year
the stamp
an extinct bird                Ikuyo Yoshimura