Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

When setting about reading a new collection of haiku, I’ve let it become a habit to mark all those little poems which attracted my attention in some way or other. As a rule not much comes out of this procedure, yet even a poor harvest is not necessarily a bad comment on the author. A critical connoisseur will appreciate just a handful of fruit, if delicious. Andrew Detheridge is an exception to my generally modest expectation: he has managed to cultivate an amazingly mature garden. All I know about him is that, as a member of the BHS since 2000, he has submitted haiku and tanka to Blithe Spirit regularly and, according to the acknowledgments some of his haiku have appeared in other magazines abroad: in the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand  - Andrew is far from being a novice writer. Be that as it may, he manifestly knows his job, by both talent and experience. Here is my statistical approach: a total of 122 haiku, 100 of which are free-style or organic including 1 two-liner, and 22 show the traditional pattern including 4 variants, e.g. 5-5-7. To my mind about one half of all are really remarkable, an astonishingly high rate.

AD has both a distinctive sense of formal poetical devices (rhythm, sound, caesura, word order) and of meaningful content owing to his attentive eye for the particular essence in ordinary phenomena which often results in convincing surprise effects, e.g. the thought of her / spoilt / by the taste of the envelope. What I would call hackneyed examples (staring out of the window / she wonders / if he ever thinks of her) or contrived ones (a street lamp lights / the shortest day of the year; / ahead, the road narrows) are rare.

Mentioned only as an aside, but possibly for some readers of special interest, AD uses only lower case and relatively few punctuation marks; among them just the following : 27 commas, 23 dashes, 11 semicolons, and 3 colons. The title of the book leads the reader astray: the haiku it refers to is from a mundane experience: the world spins darkly / as he grips the donkey’s tail / tightly in his fingers.

Many of the haiku collected refer directly to diverse human affairs avoiding a too restricted concept of nature.

amalgamation:  one hand in Grandad's, / a jar of tiddlers / in the other

ambiguity:  you swing open the door, / intent on fulfilling / the promise in the air

contrast:  spread-eagled in the cool, / she misses him / but enjoys the extra space

correspondence:  the storm subsides, / moments before the neighbours’ / lovemaking ceases

humour/pun:  the limp tide / washes up / a condom

sarcasm:  now you are gone, / the spaces where your photos hung / mock me

senryu:  she looks again /just as I am / breathing out

wit:  practising / his witty riposte / for later

The following three examples show that AD doesn’t let himself be intimidated by so-called delicate categories:

metaphor:  skimming stones-/ silence spills over the edge / of the morning

symbolism:  a shadow shades in / the gap between my chair / and yours

repetition:  crow / with the sun at his shoulder / on the shoulder of the scarecrow

To look more closely at two more examples: -

blending:  butterfly lands / on a wall of graffiti / and blends

Apart from the excellent intertwining of the natural and artificial there are two extraordinary effects that enhance the ‘message’: first the rhythmical bouncing that imitates a double touch-down so true to reality, and second the not absolutely immaculate rhyme (lands/blends) that imitates acoustically the process of visual absorption.

duality:  between two oaks -  / the whole of summer

This is the two-liner of course. And again there is far more than mere tricksy camera work. Consider the symbolic significance of the oak tree, the equation of a two solid concrete things and a basically abstract notion, the nonchalant reverse in the logic as parts embrace the whole, the unrealistic narrow space conceded to include an unimaginable entity. Nevertheless we are facing two parties, antagonists. That’s why there are precisely two verses. Rightly so. In opposition? No, not at all! For the author in addition resorts to the trick of employing homophony which forces us to also think of ‘hole’. Thus, no matter how small the gap between the two oaks may be, summer has got a fair chance of winning. This is what masterpieces are like.

Of course such a high standard is not maintained indefinitely. After all, however, The World Spins Darkly is undoubtedly a bright publication that will make you believe in the future of haiku as an accepted poetical genre.