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Volume 35.2
Summer 2004

 

book review:

Ascend with Care: Haibun
by William M. Ramsey

 

reviewed by Michael McClintock

Ascend with Care: Haibun, by William M. Ramsey (North Falmouth, Maine: Leap Press, 2003). 24 pages; 5H½ x 8H½; saddle-stitched. ISBN 0-9747229-0-1. $7.00 (plus $1.50 shipping) from Leap Press, PO Box 1424, North Falmouth, MA 02556.

 

More than Raisins in a Cake

This well-produced, nicely printed chapbook affords readers a pleasing glimpse through one of English-language haibun’s most interesting magic doors, the one belonging to William M. Ramsey. In my view, Ramsey is one of the few haibunists to exhibit range in subject matter, who consistently shows some intellectual gravitas, and whose work within Asian literary forms, genres, and traditions appears scrupulously to avoid “the stink of Zen,” that smelly essence made popular by American commercialism and the Feel Good Movement. Ramsey’s processes of thought and imagination show it is possible to be a mystic without also being a pain-free, escapist air-head.

Our peek into Ramsey’s “metaworld,” which he describes as “an imaginative, ‘composed’ world that is about reality but not literally in and of it,” is memorable if brief. The chapbook’s seven selections range from the short “U-Boat,” “The Swimmer,” and “Egg Hatching,” to the medium length “Buying a Soul,” “Ants,” and the multi-part “Gurdjieff, Zen, and Meher Baba.” Carefully placed into this mixture as a thought-piece is the one-page poser “Twelve Proofs of God’s Existence.” All of these haibun have appeared in Modern Haiku, with “Egg Hatching” making its first appearance in Raw NerVZ. This latter title—just three short paragraphs and a haiku at the end—makes a good introduction to Ramsey’s style, and to his use of the haibun for transmuting rather ordinary subject matter into a fascinating contemplation of the transcendent. The opening paragraph:

In the barn’s dimness we watch an errant angel forsake its heaven. The pale sky falls away in chips. A fierce beak cracks a smooth porcelain no longer worth preserving, tears a legal parchment no longer valid. Once enclosed in oval, snug perfection, urgently now the chick thrusts and pierces into this world of time, desire, and decay’s attraction.

The haibun develops like a sonnet, intertwining the central image of the emerging chick with the poet’s innermost, metaphorical speculations. The haiku that ends the piece is imbued with far more meaning and emotional freight than it would carry if read independent of the foregoing prose:

wet tremblings—
in straw and eggshell bits
a blind peep

Like good poetry—the kind we return to, reread, and ponder over—each of the haibun in this book swims like a well-crafted fish into the deeper waters of the intellectual and emotional sea. They are not poetry, prose, or prose-poetry: they are haibun, and as such they help define the genre in English as something more than superficial, cursory descriptions or narrations in which haiku appear like raisins in a cake.

Ramsey’s haibun prose is different from what we are accustomed to: It collides with itself and our own expectations; it sets in motion ripples that lap and fold, and that occasionally produce the rock-breaking quake. Ramsey never writes an inert sentence; his structure and language are tight but not austere—there is supple richness in his phrasing and words. The haiku function and contribute to the whole of each piece in a variety of ways: as counterpoint, as implicit metaphor, as a tight, close-in focus, or as concrete “objective correlative.” In the longer, four-part haibun, “Gurdjieff, Zen, and Meher Baba,” the haiku are syntactic extensions or continuations of the prose, as in this excerpt:

a beetle eating
what is left—glinting
copper green on dung

and i smile knowing that nothing on earth, not even waste, is waste, and all is somehow incredibly rare, and i will tell this to my wife if she is strong today. Minutes later, bent at work in one of the bins

turning compost,
my smile twitches at a toad
speared on the fork

Unlike many purely narrative haibun, which tell a story or relate an incident, Ramsey’s haibun are more akin to impressionistic essays into the less discursive nuances of mind and heart. His themes are found most frequently in the puzzlements of contemporary life, in which material wealth surrounds us yet leaves us beggared in the soul.

The chapbook’s end-piece is a question-and-answer, interview-formatted essay titled “Depth Charges” about the art of haibun, written by Ramsey with Rich Youmans. Youmans, the Leap Press editor and publisher of this volume, has elsewhere demonstrated his interest and understanding of the contemporary English-language haibun. His essay, “The Marriage of Prose and Haiku: Linking in Haibun,” which appeared in Acorn’s Supplement #3, In Good Company: An Exploration of Haiku-related Linked Forms, was one of the better, more sensitive discussions of haibun to be published anywhere during 2003.

Overall, Ascend With Care makes a very promising start to Leap Press’s future plans, which include publication of a series of similar chapbooks featuring English-language haibun by some of the genre’s best practitioners. I intend to read them all.

 

 

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