Snapdragons: Haiku & Senryu

Betsy Struthers is a poet and novelist and the author of Found: A Body.

These five slim chapbooks may provide their writers with a sense of pleasure, comfort, and encouragement; to others, however, they offer little more than a passing interest. Only one, Meyer’s The Tongues Between Us, shows promise of better things to come.

Dorothy Corbett Gentleman published a collection in 1977 with Ocean Books of Vancouver. The Ring of Years contains brief pictures of landscape written in simple open verse. The images are not particularly new or striking and rely on an overuse of similes. The poems, though competent, fail to excite.

Patterns of Time collects poems written between 1950 and 1970. Albert W.J. Harper relies on aphorisms and vague generalizations for the meat of his poems, while many require quite long introductions to explain the verse. In addition, his uneasy grasp of rhythm and rhyme causes his poems to oscillate between a halting open form and closed, but imperfect, rhyme schemes.

This Age of Reason: Community College Collage is a poetic dissertation on Norma West Linden’s teaching job. Some of these are amusing; several, dealing with Vietnamese students, hint at an emotional involvement. For the most part, however, these are bright snippets of verse concerned with the surface of teacher/student relations.

Snapdragons is a series of haiku and senryu by Margaret Saunders. It is perhaps a fault of the form that twelve pages of two- and three-line verse, unrelieved by illustration, is a bit wearisome to read, especially since there is no overall theme or image to connect each piece to the others. The moments of insight verge sometimes on the insipid or commonplace. None offers more than a passing fanciful thought.

Bruce Meyer’s The Tongues Between Us is the most interesting book of the lot. In it, he traces his family connections to Scotland and explores the meaning and use of language. His book displays a welcome variety of styles that clearly indicate his willingness to experiment. His images are fresh and his command of rhythms invigorating:

The night makes

its own love and somewhere beyond

these granite sills and clumsy gutters

the stars are brighter than their names can shine.

— from “Kirriemuir Tonight”

The book suffers from the prevalence of the self-conscious “I” and from a tendency towards a rather earnest tone. Still, there is promise here of better work to come.