Book Review:
Keeping Time: Haibun for the Journey

by Penny Harter
Published by Kelsay Books
2023, paperback, 100 pages
ISBN: 978-1-63980-291-3
$23.00
Ordering Information

Reviewed by Glenn G. Coats

Penny Harter’s writings and workshops have left an indelible mark on the worldwide haiku community. Along with her late husband (William J. Higginson), Penny is co-author of The Haiku Handbook, which has remained in print since first being published in 1985. She’s also published several volumes of long-form poetry (her latest, Still-Water Days, was published in 2021 by Kelsay Books) and six volumes of her own haiku and related genres, including a e-chapbook of haibun, One Bowl (Snapshot Press, 2012).

Keeping Time is her first full-length collection of haibun, with 61 pieces divided into three sections. The first two sections present haibun written before Covid-19 arrived; the final section (which contains nearly half of the poems in the book) were written after the start of the pandemic, and she references Covid several times throughout. She states in the preface that the haibun are organized as a “calendar of days,” and those days—her journey—unfold as most lives do, with joy and pain, happiness and sorrows.

I find the haibun contained in the first section to be the most compelling of this collection. Here the poems focus closely on family (arranged, as she calls it, by “seasons of the heart”): her mother, husband, and children, as well as other relatives. Images of the past permeate both the haiku and the prose sections. In “Hefting an Apple,” for example, the author shows how lifting a cold apple on a winter’s day can stir a memory of baking an apple pie with her mother. The warmth of that memory reflects again in the capping haiku.

Hefting an Apple

At the farm stand by the orchard, the last apples of the morning light strikes the foremost baskets on the rough-hewn wooden stand. I heft an apple, feel how even in the sun it holds the cold of this February day, remember peel falling into the sink, scallops of seeds and core cut from each quarter, and the scent of baking pie.

mother's pastry brush—
still bristles bending
more each year

In the orchard crooked branches fret the cloudy sky. Snow is on the wind, several inches forecast for tonight. Late afternoon the farmer will put up chicken-wire around the three open sides, clear the shelves. As I prepare to drive away, he climbs back into his truck for shelter, chafes his chapped hands.

worn sleeping bag—
its red flannel lining
soft against my cheek

Penny also draws on her dreams for several of the haibun. “Harvest Home,” for example, details one dream that captures that same sense of warmth and family. It begins with this haiku:

country cemetery—
a flock of crows cawing
between gravestones

Perhaps the crows (known for their intelligence) have answers to unanswered questions. The prose then describes a dream in which the author ascending three tiers of stone steps, eventually reaching great stone tables (“on a field beneath the autumn sky”). I imagine this is heaven with a long line of family members arriving like a river to the feast. The trail of souls leads all the way back to wooden tables in late afternoon—long ago. The closing haiku captures the way family memories endure.

acid-free paper
in great-grandmother's journal—
I reverse the telescope

Penny’s poems about her late husband, with their intimacy, privacy, and passion, remind me of Donald Hall’s writings in his book Without, where he described the illness and passing of his wife, Jane Kenyon. Hall wrote, “Your presence in this house / is almost as enormous / and painful as your absence.” In the poem “Keep,” Penny is faithful to the cycles of life—the days, nights, and months—and she keeps the presence of her husband alive in papers and books. The prose finishes with an image Penny embraces nightly, while the capping haiku considers all that is learned from a lifetime of observations—whether they are of the sun, moon, or tides, or of someone whose heartbeat was close for so long, those understandings are internalized.

Keep

v. to be faithful to / not swerve; to preserve or maintain
n. British: pasture for grazing

We keep the hours, mark them on our walls, wear them on our wrists, hoard them in chambers of our ticking hearts, faithful to the cycles we’ve ordained for sun and moon.

each year another
mark on the wall—
history

I keep your memory in cabinets of papers, on shelves of books, in drawings and photos, while the dust you’ve left behind has settled in a pillow that no longer keeps your head beside mine, though I embrace it nightly.

tide table—
the old fisherman
doesn't need to look

Because I grew up in New Jersey, lived in its towns, and fished its rivers, lakes, and bays, I am especially taken with the images in “Driving Through the New Jersey Dusk.” All of Penny’s words ring true to me as I recall trips through the dark with my father as we tried to reach a fishing boat before dawn. Penny captures stark images:

Across the valley a train whistles three times, like the syllables of a childhood name suddenly recalled, carrying with them an ache for something I rush toward this night, some landscape lost so long ago I can only guess its vague shape.

I feel that the sentence that closes the final paragraph captures the essence of this collection. “I had forgotten: the journey is our destination—the lost landscape, the nostalgia that swells across these hills, motive enough to keep going.” This line relates to the book’s subtitle, and all of the haibun are linked to that lifelong journey. The closing haiku shows that the path is not always clear.

from the mountain
only rivers, only clouds
on this moonlit map

A sense of darkness and danger surrounds the haibun in the second section. “The Way of Water” leads off this section, with the author addressing herself as a child, asking if she recalls the boathouse where she once caught sunfish with a safety pin tied to a string. The weeds and algae are thick, as they tend to get in the heat of summer, but threats appear to lurk below the water’s surface:

You knew a web of weeds lived beneath the water’s gentle invitation—algaed fronds that snagged your legs as your dangled them over the edge, and you would not jump into the slime and silt that lay below.

The threatening images continue when she returns to the cottage in which they were staying: “Three tarantulas crouched in wait for you; their hairy legs, big as your small fingers, spanned the iron stains of what had been a small taste of the lake.” She warns the child that, even when she is older, water will stalk her. Even the final haiku warns of drought.

stunted corn stalks—
dust devils rise from
the cracked dirt

This first haibun forebodes what will follow. Ominous images abound: a spider that drops into a dream, a dull goldfish on linoleum, jellyfish stranded on dunes, the ghost of a gas station. There are haibun about a pedophilic old man who kills Japanese beetles, a neighbor who beats his dog, the effects of climate change. In “White Stone,” the author rubs a smooth stone that reminds her of a bear cub with its mouth “permanently” open. The lone haiku jumps to scene from a senior center where the residents, too, have their mouths open.

White Stone

I am stroking a smooth white stone found on some forgotten strand. Sloped like a bear skull, it eyes me from a rusty indentation in its side. Caressing it, my thumb finds a cub stretched out dead on the shore, having swum with his mother too far—broken ice, no seals, no land, bad storm—until drowning, he washed up here to lie on his side, mouth permanently open.

senior center—
a woman asks for more
canned fruit cup

The title poem, “Keeping Time,” closes this section, and it reminds me of the cycles of life. It begins with a scene depicted on the cover of the book, where ravens soar like shadows above red cliffs that rise like those along the Colorado River:

In red canyons of the West, ravens ride the thermals, their harsh calls dark as the storm clouds shadowing the ridges.

again that dream
of refuge in a cave
above the river

There is no other place but here where hawks still prey on the living, ravens descend on the dead, and the clock on the wall keeps time above a granite counter-top, its polished surface chilled by mountain winds.

I think of the Native American tribes (Sioux, Ute, Navajo) who constructed scaffolds to bring the dead closer to the sky. Birds like the ravens consumed the bodies, and brought life cycles to a conclusion. But if the clock above the granite counter-top represents the time a human has on Earth, the closing haiku hearkens to the beginning of a life.

nursing, the baby
smiles—milk bubbling
from her lips

The last section of the book contains thirty haibun that move back and forth between the present and the past, progressing loosely through the seasons. Nearly a third of the poems relate to the recent pandemic, yet even though many of the initial pieces are tinged by loss and vulnerability, the tone overall is brighter than in the previous section—much more hopeful.

In his introduction to his anthology Gratitude in the Time of Covid-19, Scott Mason writes, “Attending closely to what is (and who are) immediately around us constitutes our most basic act of respect. Gratitude naturally follows.” Such gratitude is evident here. In “Yesterday,” for examples, a park has reopened as the pandemic subsides. Penny observes life around her as she sits on a metal bench. She imagines slipping out of her sandals and stepping into the chilly water of a nearby lake, the exhilaration of that imagined moment captured by the first haiku:.

childhood swing
on the old oak—I fly higher
and higher

The author goes on to observe a mother and son, the boy slipping into the cool water; an older couple walking hand and hand; a pair of mallards splashing down. Again, the cycles of life and nature. The haibun ends with the promise of spring and the author walking back to her car, small steps that lead back to normal.

sunlight flickers
on red maple buds—green
leaf tips tomorrow

Two haibun are especially haunting and linger with me. In “If I’d Had No..,” Penny imagines life without a husband, without children. She writes, “If I’d had no children, I’d raise my fingers to my lips and whistle another wind to carry me away to where they might still be waiting.” Those words certainly make me think about my own life. I feel the same way about “At Home in This Body,” as I too struggle with issues that come with aging. Penny recalls all the things she could do with ease in her youth, and all the events (cancer, new hip, loss) that are part of who she is now. But she also finds a sense of peace in the present, accepting what is the here and now, and perhaps even uplift:

another morning—
my arms rise like wings
in this autumn light

Several of the haibun also focus on another aspect of aging: the need to shed accumulations built up over a lifetime, as well attachments to what’s been lost. In “Sycamore Time,” the author recalls moving to a new condo that, in its yard, had a sycamore that was similar to one she and her late husband planted years before. Just like the memory of her husband, it provides comfort—and just like memories, it too ultimately begins to fade. Ultimately, she’s saying, we must learn to let go:

But over the twelve years I’ve lived here, I’ve watched my new tree slowly die—clutches of leaves shriveling, a huge branch let go here, another there. Finally management took it down, leaving only a sawdust circle in the grass, now grown over. Although I miss it, I welcome the sky.

losing count
of the boxes I haul
to the dumpster

I first read Penny Harter’s words when I devoured The Haiku Handbook, then used ideas from that book to frame and guide my own time as a teacher. I first encountered her haibun when I was trying to understand the form by reading Bruce Ross’s anthology Journey to the Interior: American Versions of Haibun (Tuttle Publishing, 1998). In one of her haibun that appeared in that anthology (“At Home”), Penny writes, “Driving home from the station, things are cut-out, separate, like sliding by the train window.” Her haibun is based on a memory from November 8, 1988, and that is the important thing about Harter’s new collection. She kept writing through all the years that followed, never stopped looking out the train window at the losses of loved ones, at the recollections from long ago, like dipping toes in a clear stream, or the here and now of preparing a solo cup of coffee or observing life around a cedar lake in southern New Jersey. Penny Harter shows us how important it is to never stop putting words down on paper in order to find a way back—and in order to find a way forward.

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Notes:

Quote by Donald Hall from Without, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, New York, 1998.

Quote by Scott Mason from Gratitude in the Time of Covid-19, Girasole Press, Chappaqua, New York, 2020.

Quote by Penny Harter from Journey to the Interior: American Versions of Haibun, edited By Bruce Ross; Tuttle Publishing, Boston, Massachusetts, 1998.

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About the Reviewer

Glenn G. Coats lives with his wife, Joani, in Carolina Shores, North Carolina. His books include two Snapshot Press collections of haibun, A Synonym for Gone (2021) and Degrees of Acquaintance (2019); Furrows of Snow (Turtle Light Press, 2019), an honorable mention winner in the Haiku Society of America’s 2020 Merit Book Awards; and Another Lost Boat (Pineola Publishing, 2022).

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