The Wise Owl, Jan 14 , 2025

 

 

shades of colour he/she with unusual sunset

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we live in possibilities dust through a tiny hole

Password, Issue 2.1, 2025 (Ed. Melissa Allen)

“From Breath to Words” by Don Baird: Reviewed by Pravat Kumar Padhy

 Book Review

 

Translating Life Sketch into Words

 

“From Breath to Words” by Don Baird, Lulu Publications, 2023, ISBN: 978-1-312-37377-8

 

Reviewed by Pravat Kumar Padhy

 

The collection “From Breath to Words” by Don Baird metamorphoses the essence of life into the flow of a story. Don Baird is an accomplished haiku poet, graphic artist and editor. His pioneering contribution to haiku and related genres is immense and The Living Haiku Anthology is a testament to his creation of the contemporary treatise of haiku literature. The poet blends a mélange image, emotional journey, human psyche, and resilience in life's path.

 

In the possible minimalistic expression, he rekindles the journey of life with candour poetic ingenuity, tonality and a touch of mystical symbolism (yugen) when he recounts:

 

from breath to words silence more silent

 

Don is candid enough and in ‘Afterword’ he annotates: “With much on my mind, a story began to unfold. It had its own take on things; I followed along, bending as the tale became one of its own.

 

As I pursued the story, I often pondered. There’s a mood, a tone that lingers on my mind like smoke drifting from one part of a pub to another. I wanted to keep its mood by having words bound together with something more satisfying than clinical fragments, phrases, and sentences….”

 

Interestingly Don elucidates the intense flow of poetic thoughts in his haiku with dexterity, sensibility, succinctness and honesty. The collection features black and white photos by the poet and they subtly bridge the continuity in a subtle style. Rightly so he says “Scent linking, its nuance, became the story’s vital spirit. With subtle connection and quietness through feeling, the haiku lead readers on several journeys that disappear yet return…”

 

Poet Dan Beachy-Quick remarks, “Poems might be understood as regions of intense becoming, spaces of encounter and relations in which–impossibly enough–for a brief while a kind of metamorphosis occurs and, as Arthur Rimbaud so succinctly put it, ‘I am other.’ That otherness isn’t an escape from, but an entrance into.”  The poet reconciles reality and embraces pain and grief as parts of life. He dives into the depth of the human psyche and metaphorically discovers the light of hope for fulfillment in the twirled path of life:

 

in and out

the unusual path

of a firefly

 

He feels the pain of separation: “missing her friend, tears/ run along the cheekbone” and in a metaphorical framework, the poet unfolds the tears dropping from leaves and torment remains unabated as “the rain rains too.”

 

raining leaves the rain rains too

 

In the apparent chaos of life, he dreams for a glimmer of hope and remains optimistic when he pens:

 

shorter days dreams take their time now

 

He enumerates the spread of the sea as a metaphor for loss. The intense human psyche of bereavement is alliteratively portrayed with visual intelligence:

 

empty shell —

someone I know

lost at sea

 

The poet dips into the depth of grief: “on empty/ a cigarette dangles/ from her lips” and instills the reality of life through an innovative interaction or dialogue-based haiku:

 

she said

I said, “a dandelion

can’t fly”

 

Don unearths the inner feelings and paints the shades of emotion through linguistic precision, phrasing  and poetic prowess. In the following haiku, one can observe the element of stirring synaesthetic connection, ‘your thoughts’, in the muse of ‘songbird’:

 

 

songbird

I hear your thoughts

in the breeze

 

Loneliness gripped immensely as he writes: “lone star . . ./ the sound of a cricket/ singing to himself ” and the poet tries to return to the world of reconciliation: “singing tree . . ./ scattered in the leaves/ the sound of music.”

 

The journey of life necessitates continuation despite obstacles. Patience possibly helps to overcome the tragedy: “rippling/ a slow tide cuts/ diamonds.” Soon he discovers  the waves of ‘living’ with rays of optimism under  the “moon shine”:

 

waves weave waves in the moon shine

 

The textual virtuosity, resonance, and rhythms are aesthetically crafted. Don applies a novel technique “implied imagery” (from sound to seeing) in the following monoku and tangles the sense of hearing and seeing (existential reflection) by implying synaesthetic association. It is the emotional impulse that is alluded to in the word phrase “cracked tree” with poetic profundity:

 

cracked tree sudden thunder divides the forest

 

The nuances of nature and self are interconnected. It embodies the spirit of awareness, imagination and realism. Don is brilliant at using visual images in a subtle way to explore the vastness of the sky:

 

crayons . . .

suddenly, the clouds

become blue

 

The poet transforms the visual imagery to a different scale- from blue-coloured crayons to clouds in the sky. The blue colour represents serenity and inspiration. The disappearance of clouds implies the melting away of grief and pathos. The poet might be in a Zen state transcending into the vastness. This reflects the sense of hosomi (thinness) between nature and the human psyche.

 

Broadly there is a thematic resemblance between the above poem and Buson’s haiku and in both cases, the colour is used as a sparkling metaphor:

 

a gust of wind --
and the waterbirds
become white

 

-Buson (Tr. R H Blyth)

 

In the following haiku, the poet visualizes drops of water from cupped hands to the rain falling from clouds.  The haiku depicts a sense of harmonious effect (toriawase). It captivates the poetic ingenuity by zooming out into the immensity of the sky:

 

cupping water . . .

clouds leak between

themselves

 

Bruce Ross, in his preface, in Haiku Moment writes “The movement from a special attention toward a non-human nature to some kind of union with that nature is a central facet of Japanese culture.” Interestingly, references to fireflies, dragonflies, roaches, crickets, ravens, cats, giraffes, songbirds, cuckoos, seagulls etc find their places in the collection to honour the surroundings and explore human feelings.

 

It is interesting to explore the close parallel between his haiku “solid rock/ a cricket’s voice/ rings a bell” and that of Basho:

 

oh this loneliness !
only the shrill of cicadas
seeps into rocks

-Basho (Tr. Gabi Greve)

 

Don uses profound poetic skill, cadences, and subtle elegance (shibumi) in the following haiku. The first line suggests a reflection of space. The phrase “high- noon” sets the timeline. The vastness of the sea is reinforced as the lone seagull skims the dryness of its wings. It is an inventive classic with the interknitted craft of juxtaposition (space and time) with artistic sobriety:

 

distant mirage . . .

a high-noon seagull

skims the dryness

Don skillfully plays with language, creating memorable phrases with a poetic flair: “the cat licks the summer.” One can notice the disjunction between the hot summer and the cool water of a rolling river. It reminds me of Lee Gurga’s observation on haiku method as “primary techniques of juxtaposition of images and disjunction of language.”

 

rolling river . . .

the cat licks summer

from

                                                                               

her                                                 paws

 

He reconciles the storm of memories as the musical song: “flash storm/ passing memories/ become a song” and feels the burning memories of life in quietude: “sun flare/ a hummingbird colors/ my eyes.”

 

Don sketches the stillness of life as he surmises the burning shadow of pain: “midnight summer/ a cigarette still between/ her fingers.” Probably the meandering story transcends into the symbolical portrayal of empty chairs and soulfully the poet navigates the “unusual path”:

 

dream room

the unusual path

of forgetting

 

After reading between the lines, I realized the central theme as Don emailed me: “It's a kind of fiction story (with several storylines implied) that scent links from the first poem to the last. The photos scent link as well.” I think it is a verisimilitude of the poet’s story. He embraces the inner urge with a drifting mood (nioi) and arrives at the destination of realism.

 

James Hillman once wrote: “Mind is fundamentally poetic in nature”. Soul is “that which deepens.” The poet desires to discover the colours in the wind and celebrate this life despite all odds: “if you think so too a petal in the wind.”

 

I wish everyone the opportunity to explore the nuance and the transient nature of life (wabi-sabi ) in this collection.

 

 

 

Don Baird:

 

Don Baird (born May 15, 1947, Denver, Colorado, U.S.A.) is a photographer, poet (haiku, haibun, haiga), and professional martial artist. He is also an accomplished haiku poet, composer and studio musician, graphic artist, public speaker, author, and editor. His haikai have won awards in the International Kusamakura Haiku Competition (2004, 2005), the NHK Radio International Haiku Contest (2009), The Haiku Foundation’s HaikuNow! contest and Touchstone Awards for Individual Poems (both 2013), and the Santōka International Haiga Contest (2018). He has written 12 books on subjects from haiku, martial arts, poetry of God, and philosophy. Baird is cofounder and editor of the online The Living Haiku Anthology and the e-journal Under the Bashō.  He resides in Wake Forest, North Carolina, where he manages the American School of Martial Arts—Wake Forest.

 

Pravat Kumar Padhy:

 

Pravat Kumar Padhy obtained his Master of Science and a Ph.D from Indian Institute of Technology, ISM Dhanbad. He is a mainstream poet and a writer of Japanese short forms of poetry. His poem “How Beautiful” is included in the undergraduate curriculum at the university level. He served as a panel judge of “The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Awards for Individual Poems” and is on the editorial board of ‘Under the Basho.’

He resides in Bhubaneswar and devotes time to writing papers on ‘Planetary Geology’ and listening to classical music and songs. His online publications can be read at http://pkpadhy.blogspot.com

 

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Publication Credit: Literary Vibes, 155, Feb 2025 (ed. Dr Mrutyunjay Sarangi)

https://positivevibes.today/article/newsview/581 

 

 

 

 

 

Book Launch: Night Jasmine by Goran Gatalica, 22 June 2024