Book Review: envelopes
By Diana Webb
Published by Alba Publishing
Uxbridge, United Kingdom
2024, Paperback, 64 pages
ISBN: 978-1-912773-66-4
£12 GBP
Available from the author
Reviewed by Alan Peat
Diana Webb’s latest publication, envelopes, is much more than a collection of haibun. Webb describes the volume as a “novellarette”—a short novel, the plot of which is driven by a series of haibun. It further develops Webb’s previous novellarettes, which have appeared periodically since her first collection of them, Loose Leaves, was released in 2020. (Her most recent novellarette, Airspace, was published in 2023 and reviewed in cho 20.1.)
In the author’s preface, Webb states that all “the prose, haibun and haiku in the book should be read as the correspondence or work of fictional characters.” Webb’s Pessoan ability to assume multiple frames of reference is evidenced throughout the book, which is divided into eight “envelopes.” Every envelope contains haibun written by the characters—some presenting fictional correspondences through letters or post cards, others collecting haibun written by one or more characters. Each is prefaced by an epigraph that sets the context.
The first envelope (“in which is contained The Original Exchange where it all started,” as the epigraph notes) opens with a child and her grandfather having a picnic tea. They quickly enter into a discussion of art and symbolism, two themes that will be explored throughout the book. (In her preface, Webb notes that the book was partly conceived “out of interest in certain painters and poets.”) The device of imaginary conversations allows Webb to deftly introduce how the book itself will be structured, which opens with a reference to John Everett Millais’ painting The Blind Girl.
I remembered a painting I’d seen of two girls sitting in a field and there was a double rainbow behind them but one couldn’t see it because she was blind, so she had to imagine what it looked like from how her friend described it. She had an accordion so perhaps she was making up music about it. Ah yes synaesthesia said Grandad. What’s that? It’s when someone can hear a colour or vice-versa see a sound. And the painting was by Millais. Painted near Winchelsea not far from here. I wish I could paint I said through a mouthful of cucumber sandwich. Well, I can’t either said Grandad but I’m quite good with words. Me too. And that was when we came up with the plan. We would attempt some haibun around these subjects, exchange them on a regular basis and also go through every colour of the rainbow, each as a prompt for a piece of writing.
The following series of haibun focus initially on Millais and his work, then branch off into the work of Monet, Cézanne, and Degas.
The interplay between “art” and everyday life is a constant throughout the book. Webb is clearly aware of the perceptions of readers’ and uses the conversational form to puncture any perceived pomposity. She writes,
Millais was blind. To the truth of science. One of his rainbows the wrong way round.
He should not have reversed it. Art sees a truth that science can’t see.
That’s absolute rubbish.
She also reminds us that art/beauty is to be found in the everyday:
On arriving at the café, I sit beside a chap who is tucking into his full English breakfast. Puts me in mind of one of Cézanne’s card players.
The novellarette form also allows Webb to showcase haiku in which there is more “link” than “shift.” Rather than being a weakness, I see this as a strength of her haibun—instead of forcing a “shift,” she is quite content (as Basho was) to extend and develop the prose. That prose is often poetic (“The sun glances off the roofs … and russets my glance”) and her imagery throughout is vivid. Take for example this heart-rending haiku, in which the vulnerability and brevity of childhood is superbly conveyed:
child’s scooter helmet
struck by the rays
his crayon-rubbed sun
She is unafraid to omit punctuation if it adds to the flow and musicality of the prose. And she often surprises —
drainage clearance
sweet buttery fragrance
of poached egg on toast
This is, without a doubt, the first haiku I’ve read which opens with the phrase “drainage clearance”!
Envelope two (“in which is contained Scary Stuff the pieces Grandad received after I met The One,” as Webb introduces it) begins with one long sentence:
So I was in this café you see like the one you regard as a second home in my favourite seat by the window when suddenly my glass of water became a prism and landed a tiny seven hued spectrum which took me back straight as a bow to the way it all started and I thought of hope and remembered a painting by Constable of Hampstead Heath which he caught in a feeling akin to happiness and I remembered something of science and art from school about Goethe and his theory which influenced Turner and as I was thinking about all that I was tempted by the way the display was arranged in the charity shop across the street and then this chap at the adjacent table seemed to be chatting me up when he said it’s a good source of fashion that place and I often bought stuff for my girlfriend there before we split up and sometimes I used to paint her wearing them.
This envelope is a cornucopia of locales, artists, and writers—charity shops, Keats and his house, Goethe, the Pre-Raphaelites, Dickens, Hardy, Millais, and more—and it ends with Webb using an unsent letter as a starting point for the couple’s own haibun. This could have resulted in quite a jumble, but somehow Webb manages to make it feel more like a wide-ranging conversation with an old friend. And a well-chosen haiku always brings us back to the minutiae of the everyday:
X marks
the unknown spot
red biro cap lost
Envelope three contains three messages “from places we were sent by She Who Must Be Obeyed”; each hints of two people separated and longing for reunion. This section feels more fragmentary, though the haibun titles—the back and front of a postcard of the Bridge of Sighs, the back of a portrait of Shelley—add a tangible context. It’s followed by an envelope in which Webb shifts gear with a bravura series of haibun written “at the writing group which Auntie Alice sent me to attend.” (Is this “She Who Must Be Obeyed”?) The result of this conceit could have been confusing. Webb, however, uses it to further explore the developing themes of “art in the everyday” and the “intermingling of past and present.”
Envelope four also contains a haibun rendered in ballad-form. It’s the kind of haibun that often struggles to find a place in a journal, the loss being wholly that of the publication. The opening verse and haiku demonstrate Webb’s willingness to extend the boundaries of haibun:
Ballad of Lizzie Siddal
Oh Lizzie, she was a milliner girl,
making hats in the alley,
When along came a swain whispering
‘I can make you happy.
Oh Lizzie Lizzie come with me,
and make your face your fortune.’
So off went Lizzie,
stream of red tresses a flowing…gallery exhibit
curl in a space
space in a curl
The adventurousness found in this envelope is further developed in the fifth, which contains pieces that the speaker and her grandad “shared with each other At the Biker’s Cafe.” It contains haibun such as “Tree man Keats’ open mike slot over at the Bikers’ Café” (“Tanked up with fuel of images we roar around deceptive bends of poetry like sheep meandering far beyond the pen”) and “The click of remembering,” which opens with the memorable line “I am knitting with the softest of yarns when I suddenly know I am knitting the clouds” and concludes with this resonant haiku:
dropped stitch
the pattern undone
the pattern repeated
By envelope six, which contains pieces written “about the moon in honour of its goddess Diana,” time and space have become fluid. The opening haibun is dated “November 23, 1817″ and the one that follows references the multiverse. Webb is at her most experimental here, and yet, throughout this envelope, the moon is a constant, unwavering presence. She proves that we can be both true to tradition and, with absolutely no contradiction, avant-garde and experimental. To top it off she adds a triple ekphrases into the mix, referencing works by Hiroshage, Whistler, and Hokusai. An excerpt:
And there it is. The moon shines full in the sky above Kyōbashi Bridge. A man navigates his rustic craft beneath, with its simple cargo. He passes by the bamboo yards. No fireworks here. The lunar disc suffices.
woodblock prints
glint back from his eye
on the twilit Thames
In the penultimate envelope we are introduced to a new persona: Moira, a care home resident. Webb subtly confronts mortality—in one haibun, a woman “leans against the parapet, peering over toward the depths…” And yet the author continues revel in art. This exploration of Monet’s Waterloo Bridge delights in its description of the many shades of blue.
Blue over space where chimneys and chimney smoke are also magicked to blue. There see ripples of blue and a barge of blue. Maybe painting like that made Monet happy. Maybe bluebirds flew over the Thames not so very far from the White Cliffs of Dover. Puts me in mind of Tchaikovsky’s bluebird pas de deux in the wedding scene from The Sleeping Beauty which brings me to Degas’ blue dancers or were they violet?
grand jété of faith
across the world stage
infinite sapphire
In the eighth and final envelope Webb reveals her concluding surprise: a haibun rendered as a pared-back play script. Re-introducing the book’s initial images of rainbows and poppies (and the setting of an afternoon tea), the speakers engage in an exercise to create haiku. It’s a fitting ending to a virtuoso performance. Constant experimentation has been the through-line of Webb’s output since 1998, when her first haibun was published by Martin Lucas in Presence. Over a quarter of a century later, her eagerness to “push the envelope” is undiminished. For this reason the title of her latest collection is doubly apt.
The book ends with two haiku that neatly encapsulate Diana’s deep knowledge and respect for the historical tradition, and also her vivacious need to experiment and stretch the genre.
a gull at sunrise
sweeps up the Hunter’s Moon
sheened in rubyfor today
for today for today
for today
I recommend envelopes without reservation. It deserves a place on every haibuneer’s bookshelf.
About the Reviewer
Alan Peat is a UK-based poet and author. He was runner-up in the 2021 British Haiku Society’s Ken and Norah Jones Haibun Award and in 2022 won a Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun. His book of collaborative ekphrastic haibun with Réka Nytrai, Barking at the Coming Rain (Alba Publishing, 2023), is available by e-mailing alanpeat@icloud.com.