watersmeet: haiku, Watersmeet Haiku Group.  Tasmania, Pardalote Press, 2005.  59pp.  RRP: $A18.50, p&h $A5 overseas.  ISBN: 0 9578436 5 8.

Reviewed by Patricia Prime

watersmeet: haiku is a collection of haiku by the Watersmeet group of poets in Hobart who write and share their haiku with each other.  The collection contains a short introduction to haiku, biographical notes on the poets and an explanation of the group’s activities written as an end piece by Ross Coward.  The book is set out in alphabetical order of poets and there are eleven poets included.  Each poet is represented in the collection by 8-10 haiku.  Some are familiar names, such as Ross Coward, Peter Macrow, Ron Moss, and Lyn Reeves, while others are less well known.  The book is dedicated to the memory of one of the members, Doris Reeve, who passed away in 2005.

The subjects of Jenny Barnard’s haiku are trees, animals, birds, a church and a plane.  There is some delightful care taken about the continuity of these poems.  Some are a humorous (“cat’s tail / held high / resists the wind”), and Barnard chooses images carefully juxtaposes them well (“plane takes off - / I grip his hand / and my rosary”). It is a nice progression of thought and observation.  Her haiku “morning mass / in the old country church - / one farmer and me” is revealing in more ways than one.  Her poems are down-to-earth and definitely “about the environment, the natural and human world we live in,” to quote from the notes on haiku at the beginning of the book.  A sample of her final haiku gives a vivid concurrence of sound, silence and emptiness

dog howls
the empty street
echoes his sound

Jill Cartwright’s work is unfamiliar to me and her section contains some good work.  I spent some time reading and re-reading her haiku.  There is no conflict here between the reporter and the creative poet, for example, the haiku “bushfire - / banksia seeds / fall into ash” is well put – a mature mind at work.  “cloudy day / the sunflowers / don’t know which way to turn,” is a good example of Cartwright’s haiku.  She uses some typically Australian images to good effect: bushfire, pencil pine, garbos, and the lovely image, “pomegranate moon” from her final haiku:

earth’s shadow
cannot eclipse
the pomegranate moon

 You have to read the rest to put the poems in their proper context.

There is diversity and range of talent in Ross Coward’s poems.  Coward gives us an external world that shows surprising insights.  I liked his one-liner: “no moon no stars at edge of forest hut’s light” where the moon and the stars disappear from view as the larger light from inside the hut takes over.  There are many haiku on the theme of cemeteries, gravestones and pines, but “among the headstones / one small pine / bends with the wind” is credible and translates into something eminently readable. One of my favourites is

midday sun
undersides of camellia leaves
the veins showing through

Greg Jemsek is probably the writer least know to me.  He produces “one out of the ordinary” with his first haiku, “airport arrival / pushing aside passengers / with my eyes.”  Many of his poems are humorous and centre on humanity’s foibles, for example, in the following haiku, “steering the old jeep / through the wedding gate posts / nothing damaged yet” focuses on the culture of what happens before, during and after the wedding ceremony.  His two-line haiku

fireplace embers
breathing till the flame ignites

is a simple, everyday image to which we can all relate and is economical in its use of words.

Christina Kirkpatrick has a truly individualistic style.  Her poems are imaginative (“still making / the cold flowers sag / autumn bees”) and vary in line length and syllable count from the one-liner

every hour a bush the flower clock

to the more traditional form of

a winter’s morning
wind riffles grey feathers
on the heron’s back

Peter Macrow is a quite special poet.  His directness is uncluttered by extraneous words.  He is an experienced writer of haiku, poetry, book reviews and fiction and a collection of his haiku called oil slick sun, has also been published by Pardalote Press.
Macrow’s haiku have been published in various magazines and I really look for them.  There are one or two haiku here that will test your emotions and intellect, such as “white clouds / hard to believe / I’ve been there” and “light on the pond    a feather.”
One of my favourite haiku is

white clouds
hard to believe
I’ve been there

Ron Moss is a well-established artist and poet.  His haiku and other Japanese forms of poetry have been published in several languages, in anthologies, magazines and on the internet.  His poems cover almost every gambit of human experience.  None of them are overdone and one of my favourites is “Salamanca Market / a child steers a doughnut / with both hands.”  Nothing is pretentious; just careful observation and good craft.  A great sense of humour is shown in haiku such as “car wreck - / the plastic elvis / still smiling.”  Moss has a good feel for nature, a love of solitude and the outback.  He captures the essence of his passion for climbing in

tall swampy gum
remembering the days
when I climbed

There’s a lovely haiku sequence, called “Among the Trees”, from the late Doris Reeve.  The poem takes us from being among the trees and leaves, “in the forest / pine leaves cool / my hands” to an absence of leaves on a single tree, “sunset / one leaf glitters / in the gum tree.”  The poems in the sequence express her response to her environment, and the way in which she captures water, sunlight, wattle blossoms, rosellas, insects and the breeze in these simple, yet effective haiku, is quite beautiful.

Lyn Reeves has had a long career in poetry, editing, judging, and publishing.  She was also a former secretary of HaikuOz and has published a collection of her poetry, Speaking with Ghosts (Ginninderra Press, 2002.)  Her poems continue the consistently high standard one comes to expect from her work.  The haiku hum with life (“April gale - / the carp windsock / tugs at its hook”) and busyness (“symphony concert - / only the conductor / allowed to dance.”  Deceptively simple, yet sure of themselves, the haiku reveal hidden depths and layers of meaning, as in the following haiku

winter park
the metal name tags
of dormant plants

where we can visualise the speaker in the park in the middle of winter, looking at various plants, reading their botanical names and thinking about the coming spring and how the gardens are going to look in summertime.  

Stuart Soloman, originally from the UK but now living in Australia, has had poetry published in Australian and British magazines and a collection of his poetry is forthcoming from Pardalote Press.   Soloman’s haiku express a wide range of perceptions and emotions.  Take, for example, “cutting firewood / the axe splits / a skink” and “the salad eaten / I leave on the plate / one caterpillar” – nice line-breaks that lead one to a surprise in the final phrase.  Here, again, we have a flurry of Australian imagery and names: currawongs, Lake Pedder, the fagus, Boggy Creek, and King Billy pine.  I like the imagery in “night fishing”:

night fishing
mackerel bands on ocean
the moon swims through

It is easy to imagine the darkness of the night sky, illuminated by moon and stars, the luminescent colours of the fish, the silence and joy of the fisherman.

John Ward not only writes haiku, but verse, short stories and personal history.  My favourite among his haiku are “he grows fatter / with each flimsy leaf / the golden Buddha” and “fireglow - / from arms to loving arms / the child’s first steps,” with its lovely alliteration.  Ward captures the magic of the bush that has been devastated by bush fires in this lovely haiku

apple blush –
the Huon sunset smudged
with bushfire streaks

It is so visually captivating that one could easily imagine it to be a painted scene or a haiga.

The haiku in this collection are like shot silk, lined with ever-shifting gauze.  There are no weak haiku in the book.  Every page, every poem, offers marvels of observation.  The language sings, even where it may disconcert.  Here are poets concerned with the everyday, with making the reader aware of the environment, with making true communication with the reader.  There is, I think, a journey here for anyone – for everyone.  The paths are all clearly marked in this fine collection.