Review Articles
One Hundred Haiku: Francis Gallagher
One Hundred Haiku: Francis Gallagher. 24 page A6 stapled paperback, £3 from the author at 36 Mavisbank Gardens Bellshill Scotland ML4 3ES
Francis Gallagher certainly sticks to his haiku guns: scourge of the purist, writer of a famous letter to Presence 11 in which he attacks the ‘coterie mannerism’ of haibun (‘the kitsch of tourism’) and the ‘brief doggerel’ of ‘most published haiku’ which he assesses variously as consisting of ‘exhausted clichés’, ‘nutty moments’, ‘voodoo parallelism’, ‘auto-pilot junk’, ‘the plonkingly obvious’, and ‘mystical nonsense’ and accuses the editors of Presence and Blithe Spirit of operating ‘cult rules’ to favour their friends. Food for thought.
Perhaps it’s subsumed under the heading of ‘exhausted clichés’, but to his list of descriptions of ‘published’ haiku can now be added ‘hi-jackings from old haiku masters’: the themes and images of well over a half of his hundred can be easily traced in the pages of ‘The Genius of Haiku’ and Blyth’s ‘History of Haiku’ (no doubt more could be traced in other sources). Except for the few that are obviously FG’s own input, these haiku are variants of haiku by Issa, Bashō, Buson and others less well known. Instead of passing these haiku off as his own, FG could have declared his interesting creative process: his book provides an study in comparative versions, useful for haiku workshops. I really like his Bashō variant: the thin summer grass/all that is left now/of generals and their plans; but Buson’s The heavy wagon / rumbles by /the peony quivers becomes the overloaded reverse focus of the peony trembles / in the aural wake / of loaded wagons passing by.
A little overpriced considering the quality of the production.
Page(s) 62
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