Three Press Here Books Reviewed

review by Wally Swist

Starship Earth by Adele Kenny, Press Here, P.O. Box 4014, Foster City, CA 94404, 1990, unpaged, wraps, $5.65 postpaid.

The Haijin’s Tweed Coat and Tremors by Michael Dylan Welch, Press Here, P.O. Box 4014, Foster City, CA 94404, 1990, unpaged, wraps, $4.65 each postpaid.

Chapbooks from a new press do not automatically mark an auspicious publishing history. Yet the recent work published by Press Here is quite surprising both in content and design. As readers may know, the first volume Press Here published was an interview with Anita Virgil by vincent tripi, On My Mind. Editor Michael Dylan Welch has followed with a collection by Adele Kenny, Starship Earth, and two of his own volumes, The Haijin’s Tweed Coat and Tremors.

The chapbooks Press Here has published so far are professionally produced and characterized by a simplicity and elegance in layout and cover design. As quietly impressive as their production is, the work these volumes contain aims for a high aesthetic norm. Press Here just may fill the gap left by the dissolution of Wind Chimes Press that for so many years, under the guidance of Hal Roth, published chapbooks worthy of acclaim and attention in the haiku community.

Starship Earth is Adele Kenny’s fourteenth title in just a little over a decade, and she needs no introduction to anyone even remotely familiar with North American haiku. The poems in this volume deal thematically with the environment on many levels. Her concerns range from pollution to animal protection and from drug abuse to rape. So, for Kenny the environment is not only defined by earth, air, and water, but that of a psychological, if not spiritual, nature as well.

Well-known poets and literary figures largely outside of the world of haiku have suggested that the trouble they have with haiku in English is that there is, as they see it, an attempt to make life more beautiful than it really is. If anything, Kenny’s haiku in this volume will escape criticism of this kind. She deals with the painful truth of environmental destruction, unadorned, in its stark reality, and there is nothing beautiful about it but the craft with which she so distinctly captures some of these moments.

in the tuna net

a dolphin’s

strangled song

hauled up on deck

the humpback whale

breathing its own blood

Kenny’s eye also reveals other societal concerns in a rather riveting fashion—issues that seem to lurk in the collective psyche that we often need to repress to just try to get through the day. Especially consider the flash of unconscious compassion and frustration found in “on the grocery bag,” and the haunting portrayal of a rape victim.

on the grocery bag

I hold in my arms,

the face of a missing child

even when she closes hers

             the rapist’s

                   eyes

Although despite her adept sense of the haiku form, there are a few poems in this collection this reviewer felt may be lacking. Kenny’s heart is in the right place, yet somehow the poems quoted below seem to read more like sentences than like haiku, and unlike much of the work represented here, fall flat.

dimming the moon

                                   gray drifts

                                                      of smoke

arcing

over ice floes

the cries of the hunted

Yet overall, this volume of Kenny’s is quite effective and is often infused with a breadth of vision.

Michael Dylan Welch’s two chapbooks The Haijin’s Tweed Coat and Tremors, for the most part, are successful chapbooks as well. Almost an overnight haiku classic, his sequence depicting a haijin in which the titles of haiku magazines are named is clever without any hint of contrivance. This sequence should serve as a kind of mini-trivial pursuit for haiku poets to see if they can find all the haiku magazines that are included. Welch has gifted us with a sense of fun here, and it is no small task to accomplish this while still creating a haiku sequence that possesses a resonance.

     Tremors, on the other hand, is a chapbook whose theme is the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. This volume contains eighteen haiku and one haibun. The haibun alone is worth the price of the volume. Yet for reasons of space this reviewer chooses to only quote from the best of the haiku.

               aftershock

                 pausing

then finishing the argument

the night of the quake

            learning

my neighbour’s name

It shall be interesting to see how this press fares from here, but judging from these initial publications, it has proven itself to be on course as a worthwhile and promising venture.