The Tao of Water, haiku and tanka by seven poets. A handmade book designed and published by Giselle Maya, 84750 Saint Martin de Castillon, France.  Limited edition 2007.  Illustrated with calligraphy by Yasuo Mizui and photos by Martin Timm, 52 pp.  Large format: US$30 plus US$9.60 airmail postage (or 25 Euros, postage 7.20 Euros).  Email: GISELLE.MAYA@wanadoo.fr

Reviewed by Patricia Prime

The Tao of Water is a collection of haiku and tanka by seven well-known poets: an’ya, Christopher Herold, Kirsty Karkow, Mari Konno, Giselle Maya, Michael McClintock and June Moreau.  It is a handmade book produced and edited by Giselle Maya, illustrated with calligraphy by Yasuo Mizui and photographs by Martin Timm.

The character “Tao” translates as “way,” “path,” or “principle.”  Tao is often compared to water: clear, colourless, unremarkable, yet all beings depend on it for life and even the hardest stone cannot stand in its way forever.

Resonant and delicate, the poems in The Tao of Water explore the physical and imaginary.  This is a collection that investigates what it means to be human, probing into the meaning of life and nature.  At once atmospheric, with a surreal blend of emotion and memory, The Tao of Water is a fluid and ever-shifting landscape of possibilities. These poems are restless and inquisitive.  They are poems attuned to our tough yet fragile planet.  Feelingly, they celebrate water and the inexhaustible theatre of the landscape.

In the first section entitled “lake,” the first haiku by Elizabeth Searle Lamb is given a page to itself:

     now only water
     where the great clouds spread out
     below the dam

This is followed by Christopher Herold’s four-page haibun “The Chameleon: Water.” The haibun is in essence an account of journey in body and mind, and at its best leads the reader away from the individual’s perceptions towards something more general – hence the use of haiku interspersed among prose – and towards some sort of insight or vicarious or recalled experience which in some way is new or imaginatively refreshing.  Herold’s haibun manages this as he wanders “down to where the stream widens into a pool” and on to describe the I Ching which points out that “water provides valuable examples of appropriate conduct which can help us with life’s myriad challenges.”  He then goes on to elucidate the properties of water: its movement, its rising temperature, its energy, and solidification as ice.  “Water is essential to all forms of life,” he says, and this leads on to one of his favourite haiku written by his mother, Barbara Herold:

     spray from the hose
     my home
     at the rainbow’s end

Here is a poetry of pauses and silences, of an inner contemplation, and the act of absorbing the nature of water.

Kirsty Karkow has three tanka, and three haiku, set out three to a page, aligned left.  The poems are followed by two paragraphs of prose, where she writes about the way in which “Water penetrates every facet of our lives.” A poet such as Kirsty Karkow leads the way to a more frank, less artificially artistic appraisal of the human condition.   For example, in the following tanka, she captures the essence of aloneness amid the natural beauty of the ocean:

      waves
     and broken bits of shell
     along the dunes
     layers of black-backed gulls
     above a lone runner

In the haiku, we are made aware of her affinity with the place in which she lives, close by the sea, and with her pleasure in the sport of kayaking:

     summer sunset
     the slide of a red kayak
     into the quiet waters

Mari Konno’s selection includes ten tanka and is followed by a prose passage.  Konno claims a distinctive voice. She understands how the inherent associational fluency of words can be arranged to wonder how it is that we are so mysterious to ourselves and the world.  Full of those surprises that quicken the heart as well as the head, she takes tanka into places of saying that are clearly her own:

     the moon
     talks confidentially
     with
     the dark creative sea
     about this planet’s first life

     all at once
     transparent coral eggs
     are born
     and fill the sea
     called by the full moon

The second section is entitled “source.”  Again the section opens with a haiku by Elizabeth Searle Lamb:

     moonshadows
     the snow blue
     beneath the spruces

This is followed by six haiku and ten tanka by Giselle Maya, which in turn are followed by a prose passage.  Maya’s haiku startle and surprise with their swoops and dives, and yet ever retrieve their balance when you least expect it.  Often surreal and dream-like, they are nevertheless always hard-edged, sweet-and-sour, witty and idiosyncratic:

     from the mouth
     of the fountain’s bronze fish:
     drinkable water

     soaked to the skin
     we rush under the wide arms
     of the great oak

The syllabics in Maya’s tanka match the sense exactly, the rhythm is assured, the pauses natural and purposeful (fluidity followed by tension / license by discipline).  In keeping with this, there’s a generalized sense of movement, of recession, carried by clear sensory images that are visual and/or auditory.  The vocabulary is a life-reflecting contrast of the abstract and concrete, and the theme is carried so lightly we rarely notice the figurative intrusion of the first person - indeed it seems the inevitable, entirely appropriate, period reference:

     bottomless well
     I look into it
     no longer straining to find
     what will be – nor
     deciphering what has been

     churn
     seething water
     dragonwise
     into the radiant sky
     of windborne petals

Michael McClintock’s five tanka and five haiku are followed by a description of water.  McClintock’s poems explore the deep and sometimes uncanny relationships between our human experiences and our wider, more tenuous though, at times, no less ambiguous experiences of nature.  His poems are written in an almost subliminal language filled with beautiful tension and silent immensity.  He has the haiku poet’s eye for selecting sometimes quite specific elements that suggest and indeed require active, imaginative reader response to discern the lines’ potential implications and meanings:

     the winter rain . . .
     all the world is water
     at high tide
     the sea touches each puddle
     drawing it away in foam

     my tent
     is the ear
     of the world
     when the rain whispers
     through the pine forest

McClintock also is interested in the everyday, the commonplaces that make up our lives.  But he is quintessentially an entertainer.  He is an experienced crafter of poetry, manipulating with skill the sounds and rhythms and evocativeness of the images he uses in his haiku:

     spring’s arrival
     a mountain has melted
     into haze

     filling with rings
     the old millpond
     in a drizzle

The third section entitled “cascade,” opens with a prose passage about the artist Yasuo Mazui who has sculpted and lived in both Japan and France.  His wonderful calligraphy illuminates the pleasure we receive from water in its many guises.

Some years ago Yasuo Mizui went to see Nachi Falls near the great Shinto temple of Ise.   He was awed by the power of the falls.  Andre Malraux has called Nachi Falls “the spinal  column of Shinto.”  Mizui considered the force of the water and imagined drilling  through the mantle of the earth.

Martin Timm’s remarkable photographs illustrate his interest in dawn and dusk when the color blue is as its best.  His biographical note states, “His blue water photos belong to the series “Mousa” which relates to the nine muses or goddesses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, who inspire poetry, music, dance and drama.”

June Moreau follows with a poem called “Specimen,” plus two tanka and ten haiku.  Hers is an understated directness and simplicity of real poetic power:

     on shores
     of the pond
     it belongs
     to the mist of silence –
     the white heron
 
     at the water’s edge
     blue sash of wind
     and a faint rainbow

     feel the light folding
     and unfolding
     in the endless waves

The collection ends with two passages from the journals of Henry David Thoreau.

The Tao of Water is an interesting if mixed book and a must for any serious collector of tanka publications.  The best of the pieces for me are the tanka, which challenge by their seriousness the accuracy of the emotions.  Any reader will find many of these appeal immediately and on re-reading.  In fact, these poets are adept at exploring the techniques of haiku; tanka and prose, finding in each elements that when combined live as poetry in the most meaningful sense.