May Books: Poetry and a Play

 In addition to the novels and nonfiction I read last month, there was some poetry and a play scattered throughout.

The Home Place by Brian Friel

This play takes place over the course of one day in 1878 in the fictional village of Ballybeg, Co Donegal. Christopher Gore lives in the ‘big house’ with his son, David and their assorted servants. Gore is originally from Kent (the ‘home place’) and feels nostalgia for it. There is animosity towards him from some of the Irish people in the village (at this time Ireland was still colonized by the British and there was a movement for home rule). This is exacerbated by a Gore relative, who is an anthropologist (in the horrible, racist early days of the discipline) who wants to take measurements of the local Irish people, thinking he could learn something about their characters and ways of life through these measurements of their physical features. They were seen as specimens, an attitude that was sadly common in anthropology and that hung on longer in some places than in others.

Silence’s Bell by Florentin Smarandache

(non-standard haiku poems, translated from Romanian by Stefan Benea, and refined by

the author)

This was available on the website of The Haiku Foundation, so I downloaded it. My favourite haiku in the collection was this one:

Tender snowdrops

 draw up the spring 

from under the snow. 

After the haiku, there is a postscript which provides a biographical sketch of the author, a discussion of haiku and how and when it became a form for Romanian poets, as well as how the poet’s life experiences, including that fo exile for a time, influenced his poetry. 

Death of a Psychotherapist and Other Poems by John Wood

This collection is an attempt to document, after the fact, the dreams and hallucinations the poet had while undergoing intense treatment for a rare kind of blood cancer. He was in the process of retiring from his work as a psychotherapist when he suddenly became ill and needed chemotherapy and strong medications which resulted in strange dreams, hallucinations, and experiences. The first section of the book contains the poems and the second is the author’s analysis of the poems and his experiences.

The Crow—A Book of Haiku by Chris Gordon

This was the book of the week a weekly Haiku Foundation email. It is, in fact, a collection of haiku about crows.

Dark Leaves by Carol Dagenhardt

This is a lovely haiku collection written by the poet in honour of her late father. It was a book-of-the-week in a Haiku Foundation email newsletter. Here is an example:

bent to earth

in his last garden

one white gladiola

And that's it for May. New month, more books--some things don't change. 😏😉

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