Frogpond 34.3 • Autumn 2011 (pdf) - Haiku Society of America

Elsewhere, Lynne Rees employs haibun to juxtapose events in
a childhood memory: “We were the first people at our end of
Chrome Avenue to have a fridge” (“Aberafan Beach—Summer
of ’63”). The first paragraph presents the acquisition as the marvel
it clearly was, ending with the speaker’s first gift from the
strange new beast: an orange squash ice-lolly, which “I sucked
. . . until my gums ached.” But in the companion paragraph,
Kathryn, the speaker’s friend, fridgeless and touchy, gives her
a clout “with a long-handled spade,” condemning her over this
new difference: “And we were different now. Our butter was
hard. We had frozen peas”—the images here sadly prophetic
of a waning friendship.
Landscapes are peopled in other ways in the collection. Hilary
Tann offers a beguiling moment in which disappointment flips
over into re-discovery:
first warm day
looking for eagles
and finding the sky—
while, from a shoreline, Arwyn Evans weaves the tangible present
with a beyond filled with possibilities yet to be understood:
Trawling between stars
what limpets cling
to spaceship hulls
Noragh Jones’ haibun, “Pilgrimage to Pennant Melangell,” demonstrates
how prose and haiku can call and respond to each other,
shaping the reader’s apprehension of the foursquare appearance
yet also the mystery of “the bare mountain that gives birth to
three rivers—the Wye, the Severn and the Rheidol.” Jones’
speaker is acutely aware that the place has been hijacked: tourism
flourishes in what was a place of meditation, of pilgrimage:
Nid llu o saint No host of saints
yn ympridio ‘ma fasting here
ar eu gwelyau cerrig on their beds of stone
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