Shadwell
Hills is Rebecca Lillys first volume of haiku,
and a fine debut it is. As I read it, the following string
of adjectives popped into my head: thoughtful, subtle, calm,
refined, philosophical, meditative, and graceful. None of
Lillys subjects or imagery is entirely original. The
haiku cycle through the seasons presenting the usual catalogue
of plants, insects, and small animals, but her poems make
you feel that they have been the result of long thought,
and that no one has seen things in quite this way before.
Take, for example, the following two haiku:
Evening
rain
the downrush of day
into shadow the plot
Autumn
evening
yellow leaves cover
reserved for me
Autumn
evenings have been used as symbols of death in haiku since
Bashôs day, but the phrase downrush of
day / into shadow and the picture of the poet confronting
her own gravesite lend a feeling of freshness to the image.
The
major theme of Shadwell Hills is death or, more accurately,
the way in which Lilly comes to accept her own mortality.
Familiar images of death run throughout these poems (evening,
night, darkness, winter, wilted petals, fallen leaves, moths,
vultures, graves, and graveyards), but they never feel clichéd
or despairing. Instead, Lilly unveils an attitude that is
Taoist in its simplicity, reminding us that the end of life
is death, but also that in a larger sense Life and the cycle
of the seasons continues in spite of one any one loss. The
biographical note at the end of the book states that the
author holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton, which
may have contributed to the deliberative quality of the
book. As I devoured these pages, however, I kept thinking
of Lilly as a heir not to any philosophical movement, but
to a literary one: the graveyard poets, a group of 18th-century
writers who haunted cemeteries and brooded upon death in
its various manifestations. When Thomas Gray, in his Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard, visited a graveyard,
his thoughts were similar to those that Lilly offers: a
meditation on the inevitability of death and a willingness
to envision his own mortality. Neither poet captures the
pain, suffering, and sense of injustice that accompany death,
but I suspect that most readers will forgive the omission.
The
meditative quality of the haiku, it should go without saying,
is the result of a long apprenticeship in English prosody.
Lilly presents dozens of delightful images in this book,
among them a resin-scented wind, descending
vortex / of vultures, and pulsing yellow throat
of a frog. Just as importantly, she is in command of a swarm
of literary devices, including alliteration, internal and
slant rhyme, assonance, and parallel structure. The thoughtfulness
that pervades the book is the result of the control of language,
which treads a fine line between being natural and artificial:
First
autumn chill
ivy clinging to the inside wall
of the stone well
Straight
lines of rain
faded names of the dead
in the slave cemetery
The
slant rhyme connects the three images of the first haiku,
and assonance highlights the key words (straight, rain,
faded, names, slave) in the second. As Lilly reminds us,
one cannot think deeply in poetry without also writing well.
Shadwell
Hills is printed on thick vellum paper and is enlivened
with wood engravings by Frank C. Eckmair. I can only hope
that it finds the readership that it deserves.
|