Beautiful Chance

Mark Bastien was a Toronto-based journalist.

Beautiful Chance is Leroy Gorman’s seventh book of haiku poetry. His poetry has received wide acclaim and has been translated into French and Japanese. This collection has a single theme: the image of a girl on a billboard. It is a testimony to Gorman that the girl becomes a compelling, omniscient presence: few writers would be able to sustain and develop a theme in 42 haiku.

The poems document events that happen in the vicinity of the billboard and the changes that nature makes on the paper lady. The billboard girl watches over the world and seems to transform and be transformed by the ordinary life below her. For the most part, Gorman’s poems are accessible on first reading. He gives the reader a clear, vivid picture of the woman and then reshapes it, with the help of changing seasons. It is almost a documentary approach to haiku writing: this happened, then this happened, then what do you think happened next? The beauty of some of his images is startling: “her paper grin / &the new moon /bracket a star”; “her paper curls /wind /in dead grass.” The reader’s perception of the billboard constantly changes.

A funeral procession’s headlights beam “into the billboard girl’s Foster Grants”; a boy takes a short-cut home “beneath the paper lady’s skirt”; the author casts his ballot on election day “under the billboard girl’s scrutiny.” Each successive image of the girl refines her. Some of the poems are less successful than others: the images are too soft-focus. But this is a small complaint, because the enjoyment of the book is in the sum of its individual, mostly successful, parts.