Dance of Light

Roger Nash is a professor of philosophy at Laurentian University and the
author of Night Flying.

Elizabeth St Jacques’s Dance of Light is a worthy North American
inheritor, and developer, of the haiku tradition of the Japanese masters
Basho, Buson, and Issa. Her poems consistently possess the central
qualities of the genre. They present, in plain speech, vivid and
original images from daily life: a dewdrop bumps into a snail; a
bullfrog burps as the sun sets. Such images, seizing on the moment,
possess a quality of “actuality” that avoids generalizing away from
the image or introducing ideas that are merely “about” the
experience. This is an excellent book of haiku that should be in all
poetry collections.

Around the Tree of Light, however, is another matter. It is devoted to
poems in a form derived from the Korean sijo. Where haiku employ plain
speech, sijo frequently fall into archaic “poetical” language:
“northern clime,” “ire,” “lyres,” “shroud of Hades.”
This encourages trite imagery (“Too quickly northern geese fly
south”) and it leads to sentimentality approaching that of
formula-written Harlequin romances (“his touch ignites a million
sparks”). Not surprisingly, it also produces flat, generic language,
rather than vivid imagery. To speak of the “universe” her groom
offers her creates no poetic sense of what is offered. The word is left
as a glassy cipher; the mind slips right off.

The difference in quality between these two books can’t be put down
just to the difference of genre. The very source of inspiration seems
different. Perhaps the sijo were inspired too much by reading other
poetry. In contrast, the haiku came from enriched perceptions of life,
as much as from knowledge of the genre.