oil slick sun, Peter Macrow.  Tasmania, Pardalote Press, 2005.  64 pp.  RRP: $A18.50, p&h $A5 overseas.  ISBN: 0 9578436 7 4.

Reviewed by Patricia Prime

Peter Macrow’s first haiku were published in Famous Reporter (Tasmania) in 2001.  Since then his work has appeared in many little magazines.  He is the haiku editor for POAM and also edits and publishes Blue Giraffe.  oil slick sun is his first published collection.

Macrow’s collection begins with an introduction on how he began writing haiku, “I first started writing haiku during my third year of studying Japanese language and literature at University.  Later, after reading haiku-in-English, I saw they were very different to Japanese-language haiku, almost a separate genre.”  The book ends with a short biographical note, and there is an acknowledgements page with an impressive list of magazines in which his work has been published.  The haiku are beautifully presented, one or two to a page in this well-crafted book, designed by Tony Fuery, with cover image from Play of Light by Tony Smibert.

Macrow’s work can be approached from so many angles.  His use of the vernacular in the highly controlled form of haiku could be a focus in itself: one aspect of this is epitomised in the title of his collection: oil slick sun sounds like the line of a song, or a piece of straight talking, that allows for layers of meaning.  The title captures a sense of the environment, how humanity affects it and the natural seasons.  In keeping with his image of someone concerned with the planet, is the hope that in his haiku he can share his moments of perception and convey something of the beauty of the everyday.  oil slick sun may also refer to the art of removing oneself from the social, human tangle into the wilds of the countryside.  It also hints at self-analysis and a concern for the fine difference between what might be evasion and what is necessary self-preservation.  Macrow often broods over the mistakes and compromises we make along the way as we live a life that tries to reconcile high expectations with reality.

The haiku in this collection deftly control sound and structure to embody (or package) sense.  In the following haiku, for example,

election day
in fine rain
snow

the word “snow” makes the political view more memorable.  It “gentles” the message, making the reader listen more carefully.

In the following haiku,

sun’s last rays
on the unmade bed
her silver cross

the poetic form of 3/5/4 syllables are given zest and colour in words like “sun” and “silver” – we ask ourselves, why the unmade bed?  Is the “her” a lover, someone who has left unexpectedly, or someone who has died?  There’s a pleasure in teasing out the layers of meaning in such a short poetic form.  Though there’d be little pleasure if the haiku didn’t also carry the glint of tougher thematic stuff, as in the one-line haiku

almost up to the sill today    the snail

where the visual form equals the work of the aural form: here we can visualise the snail slowly climbing the wall, the “s’s” in the line giving us the feeling of a trail of slime.

The quality of the landscape infuses Macrow’s haiku as he draws his imagery from the wind, grass, clouds, dandelions, dunes, water, the shapes and shadows of land formations, and much more.  Yet this is also more than local flavour: the mind’s processes are often linked to these natural phenomena.  The abstract or philosophical is also given an airing – but with a delicious lightness of touch, as in the following haiku

Cradle Valley
inside
a quiet place

In this collection the natural world offers a prototype for the best of human practice – emotional and intellectual.  In poems such as

in the darkness     not sacred Fuji
songs my mother taught me   but Mt Wellington pure white against the pain    in late autumn snow

there is a preoccupation with the doubleness of meaning hidden in the simple form of the haiku.

oil slick sun is a fascinating text, not afraid of “difficulty” but not seeming to indulge in it for its won sake.  A fluid sense of time, place, individual and family generates complexes of meaning and feeling with which most readers will be able to empathise.  Macrow’s use of a briefer line in his haiku than the traditional 5/7/5 syllable form, his ability to use the structure in a very accomplished and thorough way and to challenge and subvert orthodox beliefs about the process and purpose of haiku, makes for thought-provoking reading.

These haiku of Peter Macrow’s are demonstrations of the quality of his writing.  Quality here meaning, not merely intensity, but a freedom from sentimentality and self-indulgence, a kind of achieved purity of vision recorded in a matching purity of diction, as in these two one-line samples:

willows in river mist year’s end

festival sun dancing on the table wine

The “objects” of Macrow’s vision range from a tv on the blink to the evening’s interrupted silence (“evening / noisy quiet / of the bush”); from the roar of traffic to the sound of “the song stopped / canary in my hand / her heartbeat”.  Relationships and family are part of the heritage created by affection and they remain, unreft, as it were.  The affection is measured (emotionally and as poetic measures) by the honesty of response, “last name / in my little black book / soul mate”.

The achievement of the book lies, in part, in its counterpoising of the personal and the objective, with the discovery of idioms in which the two can co-exist.  There is a tender patience in these haiku, a care that offers a solidness in a world of increasing abstraction.  It is a beautiful and tender book that one wants to return to with renewed excitement.