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David Cobb’s work as a haiku poet and haibunist has
appeared regularly, one even might say abundantly, over
the last dozen years, and is therefore familiar to readers
of this literature on both sides of the Atlantic. The biographical
note at the front of the book mentions that he did not publish
his first poetry until 1989; he has indeed been a busy writer
since that year. Previous collections include Mounting
Shadows (Equinox, 1992) and Jumping from Kiyomizu
(Iron Press, 1996), both of which won Haiku Society of America
Merit Book Award recognition, in 1992 and 1997, respectively.
His haibun, “Snowdrops in the Dark of a Dream,”
took third place in the recent Nobuyuki Yuasa International
English Haibun Contest 2002, cosponsored by the British
Haiku Society. (See review, below.) Cobb’s career with
UNESCO and the British Council, and as publisher’s
agent and teacher of English as a second language, has taken
him on assignment all over the world—to Europe, the
Middle East, and Africa—before retiring to village
life in East Anglia in 2001. In spite of this traveling
life, or perhaps because of it, Palm shows clearly that
Cobb takes the long yard of his inspiration from his native
Britain, particularly the “palpable mossy Essex”
of his home.
This
is a hefty package, and the variety is engaging. Over 180
haiku appear in 30 titled groups or sets of poems appearing
together on a page, two sets of which are more formally
identified as “sequences,” (“Tanabata sash”
and “codpoppies”), one group as “a round”
(“hellbound”), and another group as “parallel
soliloquies” (“barbed parsnips”). Cobb’s
haiku, grouped as they are, have for me more the impact
of an informal, often playful sketch, a detail or object
often wryly observed and served up to ponder, as we imagine
he did; Cobb's country road, village path, or ramble along
the edges of urban decrepitude are rich in variety and subject
matter. Some examples from these sets, which typify Cobb's
language, tone, and the direction of his eye:
the
torrent passes
in soft slow ripples
through the gills of fish
drill
squad
marching
with fixed bayonets
into fog
poky
hotel
no
room for my shadow
to unpack
Many
of the poems in these sets are senryu, or ironic observations
of human behavior; this collection and its landscapes are
peopled with characters of all kinds, and we encounter them
with pleasure, amusement, and often surprise:
his
nails squeak also
the Black teacher
with the short chalk
sceneshifters
for the opera’s final act
talking football
a
pretty stranger
she more certain than me
how long to smile
More
than eighty additional haiku—may we call them “Cobb-ku”
and still intend only respect?—appear in sixteen haibun,
which themselves range from the very short “at the
Rec” with two poems and one prose paragraph, to the
longer, more involved “A Day in Twilight,” a haibun
consisting of more than seventy prose paragraphs interspersed
with dialogue and twenty-eight haiku, along with two or
three other poetry forms.
Here
is a sample of his prose, taken from “A Day in Twilight:”
Stench.
A poultry-farmer has created a new highpoint on the horizon
with a hillock of turkey-muck. From tractor wheels, droppings
welt-deep. In a county where twenty-two inches is reckoned
a wet year, the council leaves the cleansing of a sunken
lane to rain. A mobile phone mast mimics a balding cedar
tree. Cackle from a disturbed scavenging bird.
magpie,
so furtive—
you know no one
thinks you did it
Windtangle
of old man's beard over neglected hedges. Foul ditches.
On verges of the lane newly-sprung grasses pierce through
herbage rotted by the frosts. Now a line of oak trees
compose themselves in a variety of eccentric but for them
comfortable postures. Like venerable seniors slumped before
a cold grate, I feel they demand a lullaby.…
at which point Cobb does provide the lullaby he has in
mind. His language is muscular, full of sound and the
weight and shape of things.
Additionally,
Cobb has packed into the book fourteen poems in a variety
of configurations, ranging from unrhymed, free-verse quatrains
to adaptations after the Chinese of Chou Pang-yen, Tu Mu,
Liu Chung-yuen, and others. Many of these exhibit lines
that are rich in alliteration, assonance, and the occasional
sustained metered accent. In the overall structure of the
book, they contribute a refreshing change in pace and style,
creating limpid pools of simple verse by which to sit and
reflect before moving on. Here is one that I particularly
liked, “soldiers in flight.” In miniature, it
reflects much about Cobb's poetic motivations and craft—once
again his peopled landscapes and locales, as well as his
love for narrative and simple, moving story:
Mist
shrouds the water,
moonlight sinks into mud.
Tonight our boat is moored
on the Chin Huai River
close to a tavern.
The girl they have paid to sing
knows nothing of our defeat,
that the nation is broken.
Her choice of song is all wrong:
“Flowers
in the old backyard.”
–after
the Chinese of Tu Mu
In
reading this book, I found that the individual poems gained
greatly from the context in which Cobb has artfully placed
them. This is one of the chief contributions, I think, that
he makes to the genre. Quoting the poems as I have done
here, isolated from their immediate context of others in
the group—or in the case of poems taken from haibun
and the surrounding, all-important prose—takes away
some of their full impact, which tends to be associational
and cumulative, often needing the group or prose context
to maintain integrity. Standing alone—as many maintain
that a haiku must—they are frequently less sharp, memorable,
or accessible, but that is precisely what makes him such
an interesting poet. Cobb’s rural sketches of seashore
and countryside, places and people, hill and dale, small
farms, ponds, bourns, and all the rest of it, are delivered
with vigor, energy, and a winsome enthusiasm all the more
believable and real for its occasional dark underside. He
is thinking and feeling—reacting, responding—not
just passing through in detached languor, or jotting things
down in a catalogue for the sake of detail. His obvious
deep love for and skill in the English language creates
verbal oil paintings, not watercolors, sumi-e, or abstract
canvasses of smeared or exploded paint. There is much to
praise. Though we may indeed find here and there an image
that warrants our quiet meditation and sounding for its
“suchness,” Cobb’s haiku are not best described
as either meditative or epiphanous; they are vigorous and
excursionary, and well worth our enjoyment and study. I
think his contributions to English haiku are strongest in
his haiku arrangements, and in his haibun—and these
he delivers with abundance, clearly achieving wholes that
are greater than the parts. Now I think I'll swear off conclusions
and stay tuned, as this poet is far from being finished
with his work.
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