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xterminal's review
3.0
Ray McNiece, Wet Sand, Raven Tracks: New Haiku (Deep Cleveland Press, 2004)
It's always amusing to read the work of someone who gets a definition of “haiku” from a dictionary and then goes on to write it without doing extensive reading first. Most English-language haiku practitioners who have been doing it for any length of time, and almost all English-language instructional books on the subject, will echo Henderon's The Haiku Handbook: 5-7-5 is a strict form in Japanese. In English, it should be considered an upper limit, because cleaving to 5-7-5 in English tends to lead to wordy haiku with lots of filler words taking up a syllable here and a syllable there.
“skim of saltwater
on flat gray beach reflects
clouds and my shadow”
(35)
“of”? “on”? “and”? Yes, that's exactly what Henderson was on about. Also, the basic difference between haiku and senryu (while McNiece is correct in saying that senryu are often satirical in nature) is that senryu are haiku without an overt reference to a season. Which is doubly amusing in that McNiece gives us a separate section of senryu in the ironic vein, never realizing, it seems, that at least 75% of the pieces in the haiku section are, in fact, senryu.
To be fair, though, when you look at the poems as senryu, and if you do a little mental rearranging in your head to cut out the fat, there's a lot to chew on here. It would've been nice had the poet done that work for us, but it's not too much of a mental leap to do it yourself. McNiece has uncovered quite a potential vein here, and with a bit of spit and polish he could mine it for some truly excellent material; this is an interesting first step on that road. ** ½
It's always amusing to read the work of someone who gets a definition of “haiku” from a dictionary and then goes on to write it without doing extensive reading first. Most English-language haiku practitioners who have been doing it for any length of time, and almost all English-language instructional books on the subject, will echo Henderon's The Haiku Handbook: 5-7-5 is a strict form in Japanese. In English, it should be considered an upper limit, because cleaving to 5-7-5 in English tends to lead to wordy haiku with lots of filler words taking up a syllable here and a syllable there.
“skim of saltwater
on flat gray beach reflects
clouds and my shadow”
(35)
“of”? “on”? “and”? Yes, that's exactly what Henderson was on about. Also, the basic difference between haiku and senryu (while McNiece is correct in saying that senryu are often satirical in nature) is that senryu are haiku without an overt reference to a season. Which is doubly amusing in that McNiece gives us a separate section of senryu in the ironic vein, never realizing, it seems, that at least 75% of the pieces in the haiku section are, in fact, senryu.
To be fair, though, when you look at the poems as senryu, and if you do a little mental rearranging in your head to cut out the fat, there's a lot to chew on here. It would've been nice had the poet done that work for us, but it's not too much of a mental leap to do it yourself. McNiece has uncovered quite a potential vein here, and with a bit of spit and polish he could mine it for some truly excellent material; this is an interesting first step on that road. ** ½
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