 Journeys c/o Hermitage West PO Box 124 South Pasadena CA 91031-0124 USA $1.80 Subscriptions: 4 issues $6 checks payable to "Hermitage West" email Journeys Before commenting on this review please read the FAQ page Home page Notes for publishers Want to be a reviewer? Anthologies. Books. Audio. Magazines. Software. Video. Artefacts. Web design by Gerald England This page last updated: 11th August 2004. |
Journeys #2 | |
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Journeys is a pamphlet containing seven haibun by several well-known writers of the genre, among them John Stevenson (USA), David Cobb (UK), Larry Kimmel (USA) and Bruce Ross (USA). As one would expect from such a talented group of writers the work is of exceptional quality. According to Bruce Ross in his excellent book JOURNEY TO THE INTERIOR, AMERICAN VERSIONS OF HAIBUN (Tuttle, 1998), In his old age Basho, who may be credited with establishing the haiku form, undertook a long journey to the remote regions of northern Japan, fully expecting to die before completing it. He did complete the journey, and his record of it has become a classic of world literature and an example, in its broadest sense of haibun, autobiographical poetic prose accompanied by haiku.Let's see then how the poems in this pamphlet measure up to this ideal. Bruce Ross's haibun "TULUM" follows his own description of what haibun is to the letter. It is a description of discovering a "Mayan temple set on the ocean", its following haiku completing and adding to the dimensions of the poem: Tulum . . . the red hand prints faded now in afternoon lightJohn Stevenson's short haibun UNTITLED, is a poem with a natural setting, where everyone but the poet is asleep and "The muffled sounds wake no one". A poem about self, autobiographical, that is completed by its haiku about the fireworks that everyone but the poet missed: night train the fireworks you missedDavid Cobb's poem is about dying women in a hospice or nursing home — a melancholy topic, but one that is not without relief. The haiku following the prose demonstrates that there is always hope and that life may be renewed in one way or another: as she lies dying I tell her the crocuses are early this year . . .Larry Kimmel's prose poem WHO LOVES TO LIE WITH ME, a poem in which the poet is accompanying a girl on a walk through the park concludes with a free-form tanka with its subject of regret at a love affair that can never be recaptured: how I wish I had never walked this pathMatching the intelligence of these poems is the force of their language and form. We feel that we can hear the grass grow under our feet and the bird's heart beat. Essentially the subjects are the soul's experience of the natural world. The prose poetry is ambient, evoking atmosphere in plain language and with gently modulated rhythms. Human beings tend to be shunted into the background and the natural world brought to the fore with a tenderness and attention to sensual detail that is touching and, at the same time, evokes a response. | ||
| reviewer: Patricia Prime. | ||
| Journeys #3 | ||
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A very neat little magazine, consisting of a single sheet of paper folded into three which is dedicated to short English-language haibun, commonly under 250 words, and seeks to showcase examples of this prose-and-poetry and prose-poetry genre as poets adapt it to contemporary idioms and life.All the examples given were very good, and stuck to the above guidelines — no signs of lily ponds, frogs or magnolia blossom. Best of all was TINY ROBOT, by Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, which can only be described as an sf haibun. A woman discovers that she is pregnant... by computer virus: this is not a child growing inside me. but a virus, a tiny robot.It concludes with a chilling haiku: A newborn child screams The doctor cuts The electrical chord | ||
| reviewer: John Francis Haines. | ||
| Journeys #4 | ||
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Hermitage West is a private foundation devoted to the exploration and development of English-language haiku, senryu, tanka and related literature, including the haibun.And only this latter form is what appears in Journeys. What I like about the haibun published here is that they are short, less than 250 words of prose with no more than two haiku. Better still, they are not the apt-to-be-boring travelogue type of haibun that one finds too often in too many of the "haiku" journals. In fact, the editors say they are not interested in imitations of Japanese models,and they say this in spite of the name that, an obvious allusion to Basho and his work, they have chosen for their publication. The subject line for the haibun is meant to be "journeys", but upon reading the contents one will see that this subject line is a broad one stretching into all areas of interpretation. The seven haibun in this particular issue are from the American writers, Tom Clausen, Robert Edwards, Jim Kacian and Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal. They vary immensely in both content and style, and in several instances they severely test the usual definitions for haibun, and haiku too — this is from CIRCLES by Robert Edwards: Here I am again, healed and new, staggering through swamps, lurching through thorns, looking over my shoulder. Are all these bones my own? Don't stop. Keep going. Maybe this time I'll break the game of which we're both a prisoner. If I take this rag and these smooth stones, this bark for armor...and this is SOMEWHERE from Jim Kacian up in indefinite space, I sit beside a German watching MTV while I space out to the musical order of Bach:the wing quivers to unseen densities of air — going home | ||
| reviewer: Giovanni Malito. |