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The Silence Between us, Selected Haiku of Wally Swist.   Wally Swist  Brooks Books, 2005. ISBN: 1-929820-07-0. 128 pp. $16 US plus $2.50 postage
              
As the Publisher’s note from Randy & Shirley Brooks points out, Wally Swist has been an active contributor to the American haiku community since the 1970s. He is well known from many haiku magazines, and was book review editor for Modern Haiku magazine from 1989 until 1997. What then, would we expect from a “Selected Haiku” collection? Besides haiku, Swist also writes lyric and narrative poems and will be familiar with the expectations that a “Selected Poems” volume, by a poet of long standing, raises. Poets take the opportunity to look at their career as a whole, to examine the springs, direction and character of their talent, to weed out weaker work they would rather not be judged by, and to offer a distillation of their contribution to the genre as a whole. One would therefore expect more than just another one-person collection, more even than just a “best of” compilation.

As a collection that defines the author’s practice this is a model example.  A substantial body of work, beautifully produced, with an author’s preface and a thoughtful critical tribute by Lee Gurga, the reader is immediately struck, not just by the consistent quality of the haiku included but also by the consistent character of the voice behind the poems. There is an integrated mind at work within the haiku and one is reminded that the word “integrity” has the same root.

Lee Gurga, in paying tribute to Swist’s “fine body of haiku”, draws attention to them as poetry that “engage haiku traditions, both Japanese and American” and engage “all the tools of Western poetics to produce haiku that are memorable as poems, experiences in themselves.” It is this sensitivity to, and skill with words, as well as awareness of nature and of the exquisite eloquence of the moment, which is impressive. An example –

                       new moon
                       tightening the darkness
                       a cricket’s ratchet

There is no kireji indicated. The hinge of the middle line is left to swing in either direction, where both the increasing brightness of the full moon tightens the dark, and the sharp sound of the cricket tautens awareness of the surrounding increase of night. The unspoken image of a tightening ratchet is clicked up to a maximum tension of consciousness, of being totally alive to the moment.

In a retrospective collection such as this, the focus is as much on the poet as on the poetry. There is an “About the Author” résumé, together with a complete bibliography of books, magazines and anthologies, as well as listings of readings and workshops. The author emerges from the usual anonymous modesty and Zen invisibility of the haiku writer, to show us a consistent spirit and sensibility behind the work. He demonstrates the way that haiku awareness has shaped his writing voice into a strong and sensitive vehicle to express both the “sense of place” and a “sense of wonder in both the natural world and in human nature” that Swist highlights in his Author’s Acknowledgement. This is undoubtedly a book worth buying.