Books in Brief
Overviews of collections recently received
Dust and Rust
by Taofeek Ayeyemi
Butttonhook Press / OJAL
2022, PDF, 48 pages
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A Nigerian lawyer and writer who has won multiple awards for his prose and haiku, Taofeek Ayeyemi recounts in this collection memorable episodes from throughout his life so far. Through 26 haibun, we see the poet growing up and maturing, grappling with romance and longing, and striving to find wisdom through all his encounters. “The past is gone. How do we spend our present for a sweet future?” he writes in the final haibun, “Nostalgia.” In this collection, Ayeyami pays tribute to that past and its people—parents, grandparents, siblings, friends and loves—who have helped to form his present and provided the lessons needed to forge the future
Excerpt
Days of Dust and Rust
Raised near thickets and forests, we were custodians of chirps, hisses, tweets and buzzes. We also were artists, experts at decorating bad days with iridescent smiles; days our hunts escaped with our baits, with our hooks, with our only traps, with our hopes of next supper. We were mathematicians: we solved hunger with sleep, knit our tendons with gulps of water and seeds of osunsun plucked at the riverbank. We held the light of roses and matched it with rainbows, hoping to bathe in our infatuations with next-door friends. Alas, our feet only gathered dust, our lust in vain. We erupted into the mosque every now and then, where our lips exploded into litanies until our hearts dis-rusted into sanctity, accepted what the days kept bringing. Mother said if one’s water was not enough for bathing, we should wipe only our faces with it. We were birds, searching for where to perch aright, lest we burden the brittle ground with our almost weightless selves.
harmattan over . . .
one by one, plants
take colour
Raised in the World of Everyday Poets
by Darlene O’Dell
Yavanika Press
2022, PDF, 13 pages
Minimum price: $2.50 U.S. / ₹80 INR
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In 11 haibun (plus two stand-alone haiku that bracket the collection), O’Dell offers a paen to her parents: a father who became a prison guard after years as a manager in a textile mill, a mother who carried with her the loss of her own father at an early age. Both loved poetry—her father would recite Thomas Gray or William Blake at any chance, while her mother ,who identified with Sylvia Path, once wrote her own poems about loss. O’Dell brings her parents to life, through moments both poignant (especially those about her mother’s childhood memories in “Godspeed”) and silly (the image of her father sitting in a fallen porch swing, his cup of coffee miraculously undisturbed). Studded with quotations from her parents favorite poets, the Bible, and even “Casey at the Bat,” this book is a tender elegy about two people who obviously instilled a love of poetry in their daughter.
Excerpt:
Godspeed
I look at you from the other side of a cotton mask and think of your poetry now. I picture you during those long nights in your blue room, leaning into your pillow, lace pajamas hanging loosely from your thin shoulders. A ragged journal sits in your lap. Your words, your company. Together, you hold the fears at bay.
You write of dolls and tea parties, of the time your father and his brothers climbed the roof on that cold night to ring sleigh bells for the children. You write also of loneliness and of lupus, that wolf that has invaded your bed. At times, you combine a child’s delight with the adult’s terror, hoping that death will taste like ice cream.
Christmas Eve
my mother’s body
returns to the star
Another Lost Boat
By Glenn G. Coats
Pineola Publishing
2022, paperback, 111 pages
ISBN: 979-835205-4-864
$10.00 U.S.
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At the end his latest collection, Glenn Coats offers a “back story” about his first boat—a wooden vessel that had washed up along the New Jersey coastline and, after an unsuccessful search for its owner, became the poet’s. It became the vehicle for multiple fishing and leisure trips on rivers, creeks, lagoons, bays, and other waterways. Another Lost Boat pays tribute to this avocation, offering a diverse selection of haiku, free verse poems, and haibun filled with the rhythm of tides and currents. The 11 haibun in the book recount various boating and fishing trips with friends and family, along memories of his days spent teaching or brushes with mortality. They range in style from narratives to journal entries, but in all Coats displays a keen knowledge of the intricacies of life around, on, and under water, without ever losing sight of the human element—the bonds connecting family and friends.
Excerpt:
from Outsiders
August 20. Last night. The dock is pulled halfway out of the water and tied loosely to a tree, so it can move in and out with the ice. Cut the ragged lawn one more time; drain gasoline from the mower. Give the hanging plants and Canadian pennies away to neighbors. Oil the fishing reels and polish the rods with a light wax. Take down and fold the flags. Test the motion detector lights. Make one final drift with my daughters beside a rocky shoreline. My oldest daughter catches two pike while the younger one picks up her first bass of the week. It is dark when we drive the boat home across the water. My daughters point the way. Spray rises up the sides of the skiff and I can taste the lake in my mouth.
lines dangle from a sunken limb summer’s end