Haiku from Port of Spain

Haiku and Port of Spain are like oil and water.

One is cool, restrained, revelatory. The other is a conflicted whirligig mired in uncertainty. To find a book of Haiku from that setting is, therefore, something of a miracle.

Yet, that is what Alec de Verteuil and Dawn Glashier have pulled off in a gem of a little book, Echo of Basho.

Haiku, as you know, and as de Verteuil recalls in an introduction, comprises three lines of 5-7-5 syllables in the classical form. Luckily for us this is not an ironclad rule if you’re not writing in the Japanese language.

“Brevity, simplicity, purity of statement” in an “intuitive response to a specific event, observation or realization triggered by nature or by everyday things.” That’s it, more or less!

And if you insist that the Japanese sensibility is entirely foreign to a Trinidad style, Pat Bishop, in a preface, reminds you of unsuspected links.

“For those of you who haven’t noticed it, our panyards have an increasingly number of Japanese players at Carnival time and it is not too difficult today, I am told, to hear very good pan is Tokyo.”

One of my favouites from Echo of Basho.

steelband in the rain

the notes rise up and drops fall

we are drenched twice over