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As the impetus for, and co-founder of, the British Haiku Society, we all owe David Cobb an enormous debt.  Through many years as a committee member, including his long spell as President following James Kirkup’s sudden resignation in 1997, David’s guiding hand has been instrumental in maintaining a buoyant society that has greatly raised awareness of haiku and its associated forms.  I’m sure David will be the first to agree that not everybody has seen eye to eye with his ideas and his aims; nevertheless, David, more than anyone, fostered a consensus among members regarding the Society’s core aims and values that enabled the subsequent building of a healthy diversity of opinions.  It is a testament to David’s humanity and inclusiveness that the BHS now is nothing if not a broad ‘church’.

   But what of David Cobb the writer?  A haiku writer since 1977, David has also been - with Ken Jones - at the forefront of pioneering efforts to promote haibun as a viable ‘British’ form, and his reflective and provocative (in the best sense) essays have stimulated the theoretical debate needed to encourage writers to give more serious thought to their practice and - dare I say it - art.

   David’s haiku are internationally renowned for their clarity, humour and, often, their self-deprecation.  He may not be the most profoundly metaphysical of haiku writers, but there are few who are his equal at drawing humour and poignancy from simple, everyday situations. To take a random sample, from Jumping from
Kiyomizu (1) , one can see many of the unpretentious, yet highly-skilled qualities for which David’s work is rightly known:

          barbecue –                                     less light in the spoons
hairs on the cook’s belly                      waiters take in the cushion
    sprinkled with salt                                   at the Greek cafe

giving his daughter                                  towards sunset
 away – her rouge                                        the riptide rolling
 all over his beard                                            an empty crabshell

   In the first of these, the incidental detail, which a less observant mind would not have spotted, takes the humour of the situation towards pathos, as if the cook’s belly, if roasted on the spit, could feed many mouths itself.  The unobtrusive alliteration and the thoughtful visual presentation (which is evident in each of these four) create a rounded, perfect senryu.  David is surely the best senryu writer in these shores.

   The second of the quartet subtly evokes a ‘day’s end’ scene without using that or any similar phrase.  In any other haiku, the repetition of ‘in the’ would be grating, and obviously so, but here it binds the two strands of the poem together - the wonderfully precise opening line and the desultory action of the waiters, no doubt keen to go home after a hard day on their feet - to make as atmospheric a poem as one can wish to read.

The third speaks for itself, through its quietly moving focus on an imperfect detail: like the salt on the cook’s belly, the rouge on the father’s beard evinces first a humorous then a different, in this case emotional, reaction from the reader.  The father’s affection for his daughter at this proudest of moments is rendered both implicit and explicit.

The fourth again portrays a twilight moment; this time with a (literally) fluid movement given impetus by the alliteration in the second line.  The significance lies in the fact of the emptiness of the crabshell, which acts as a microcosm of the (presumably) empty - of humans - beach, and the content of which has no doubt provided a meal for someone or something.

   David’s 2000 collection A Bowl of Sloes (2)  begins and ends with two similarly excellent and tidal poems.  For me, though, it holds a place in my affections because, as the pun in the title hints, of the inclusion of two cricket-themed haiku:

September dew –                                          in the bedroom mirror
the last-man-in                                               the old slow bowler
with a yellowed bat                                        bowls at himself

   The first of these two beautifully, and with great originality, evokes the sense of summer ineluctably merging into autumn.  The second has a ‘boy-within-the-man’, whimsical humour and pathos to which I can very easily relate.  Its pacing (read it aloud) is - perhaps unconsciously - marvellous and imitative of a spinner’s trundling run-up.

The care that is paid to language in David’s poetry is just as evident in his prose and it is therefore no surprise that his haibun are exemplary.  His longest, and perhaps most impressive, attempt at the genre, The Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore (3) , contains many well-crafted ruminations on the landscape, history and literary legacy of David’s beloved East Anglia.  The end result is like a cross between the Golden Age travelogues of Edward Thomas or Richard Jeffries and the dense quasi-mystical ramblings of WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.  David hopes that it should be considered as “an authentic haibun composed in English” (4)  and there can be little doubt that, in the balance between prose and haiku, his aim is true:

     Bury.  Legend of St Edmund.  How a boy was chosen to be
     King of the East Angles. How he gave himself up to the Danes,
     hoping by this sacrifice to save his subjects from misery.  How
     his captors wanted him to renounce his Christian faith.  How he
     refused, so they nailed him to an oak, target practice, with
     arrows longer than a boy’s green-sticked arms.  Blood running 
     down the grooved bark.  Loyal followers find his torso, forty
     days later also his severed head in a thicket, reunite them.  The
     parts grow back seamlessly together. 

                             strung roof to roof 
                             on something invisible –
                             doves in the fog (5)

David is now a youthful eighty: let us hope that his tremendous creativity continues to flourish for many years to come.