Book Review: Soundings

By Keith Polette
Published by Alba Publishing
2023, paperback, 58 pages
ISBN: 978-1-912773-54-1
$15 US
Ordering Information

Reviewed by Rich Youmans

Often when I read a haibun by Keith Polette, I think to myself, “This man has a passion for words.” At its best, Polette’s writing is rich and evocative, and he has a talent for finding an unexpected simile that snaps an image into the reader’s mind. He also has one of the more expansive imaginations, sometimes taking readers into surreal realms that leave them wondering, “What just happened?”

In his new book, Soundings, that passion and imagination have produced 43 haibun covering a broad territory: meditations on the poet’s life and place in the world, memories of childhood, fable-like stories, and outright flights of surrealism. It’s an expansive collection in other ways as well: rather than the traditional single paragraph/one haiku format that dominated his previous book, pilgrimage, many of the haibun in Soundings feature multiple haiku, and his language ranges from simple, straightforward descriptions…

Summer evenings, we’d hit the streets for a game of wiffle ball. Home plate was the manhole cover in the center of the street, first base was a brick we placed in Steve Mang’s front yard, second base an orange square we spray-painted on the street, and third base a frisbee we put in Jimmy K’s yard.

full moon
the one ball no one
ever hit
                    (from “Channels”)

… to meditations infused with similies and metaphor…

Some nights are broken dishes scattered across the kitchen floor, the sounds of their shattering keeping me from sleep or jarring me awake after midnight. In the morning, the sleepless night hangs on me like a heavy coat, one so long it catches on furniture as I walk, one weighted with stones in each pocket, causing me to lurch a little, as though I were in a drunken stupor.

cold night
these white stones where
the moon once walked
                    (from “Sans Sleep”)

… to fantastical reveries tinged with wonder and humor…

When I was a boy, my great grandmother, who once had a job playing the piano accompaniment to silent movies, told me that trees like to gossip, especially in autumn. The elms, she said, like to whisper behind the backs of sugar maples, smirking that no respectable tree should flash so much red. And the sugar maples, staying silent as window store mannequins, would wait for a hard wind so they could flash the underside of their scarlet leaves to the elms, who would quickly yellow and turn away.

ruby red sunset
the smudge of lipstick
on a shirt collar
                    (from “Gossips”)

As to Polette’s ultimate intent with this collection, perhaps a clue can be found in the four epigraphs he chose to start off the book. All are from renowned poets—two from Richard Hugo, one from W.S. Merwin, and one from A.R. Ammons—and each hints at some aspect of nature’s mystery, how there’s more to this world than meets the eye. Hugo references “mystery fish…offered to the moon.” Merwin, writing in the midst of birdsong and at the end of a three-day rainstorm, bows “not knowing to what.” And Ammons turns his acute eye to leaf, bush, and grass, where “the dark work of the deepest cell is of a tune.” The cover of Soundings graphically illustrates this idea: it presents the image of an iceberg in which its submerged bulk is visible and clearly bigger than the portion above sea level.

It’s a broad theme (one that lies at the heart of poetry in general), and how the haibun render it varies. Sometimes the pieces offer a clear message to not take for granted all that’s around us. In “One World at a Time,” after reading a book that shows Bruegel’s “The Fall of Icarus,” the poet reflects on how the painting had “fallen into history, where it was largely forgotten,” and how “insignificant and disregarded Icarus is as he falls into the sea, becoming a tiny splash, unnoticed.” He carries this lesson in oversight and observance into the day:

I step into the morning for a walk to start the day, and I notice a dragonfly, dipping in and out of dawn, its wings humming with iridescence. As I watch it wing away, I feel myself being lifted, ever so slightly, into the day’s growing light.

low sun
rows of old post holes
suddenly visible

Other haibun focus less on observing the here and now, but the “what if.” This is where Polette’s surreal side often comes into play, where the depths he wants to sound are those of the imagination. Where in the previous haibun he starts the day with a walk and an encounter with a dragonly, in “Hunger” his day begins in a far different manner:

I get up and make coffee, the kitchen still quiet in the predawn darkness. It is a large cup, and after drinking it, I am an inland sea. I notice a ship sailing through the horizon of my ribs; it is filled with blue horses, the kind that you might find in a Chagall painting. Surrounded by them on the beach, I look for apples to offer, but the horses lead me to a pasture where they graze. Not sure what to do, I watch in silence until one of them nudges me. I look up and see the sun rising like a mosaic, its light shining through the stained glass of my body.

desert heat
another forty-year search
for manna

The haiku—with its reference to the Israelites’ exodus and the nourishment that enabled them to journey to the Promised Land of Canaan—seems at first glance to be quite the leap from the surreal narrative unfolding in that predawn kitchen. But perhaps these flights of imagination are what the the narrator needs to feed his hunger and help him it make it to a personal promised land.

More than in pilgrimage (which won a Merit Book Book Award from the Haiku Society of America), Polette unleashes his imagination and follows it into similarly surreal episodes. “In Bad Hair Day,” a hay bale reminds him of a giant hair curler, which sets him off on a riff about a 60-foot woman rampaging the countryside in search of a cheating husband. In “The Land of No Sleep,” an unknown traveler washes ashore, Odysseus-like, and is captured by a band of horseman in a sleepless land of “goats that give birth to storms, huts made of bones, old people who do not die, and a sun the size of a persimmon tossed back and forth by children.” And in “Meeting Magritte,” Polette issues one absurd image after another.

I board the train emerging a slide trombone from the brick wall in the fireplace and give my ticket to the conductor whose body is a cage of thin black bars and whose heart is a pair of doves that do not take flight, even though the door to their little aviary is open. I look out the window, which is a giant eye, and notice that passing clouds have assumed the form of fish swimming through currentless water. The railroad tracks extending behind the horizon are sentences falling off the edge of the page, which itself has the texture of pipe-smoke.

the chipped goblet
atop the open umbrella
filling with falling red

They’re all wild rides, but they also raise another question: how far can a narrative be taken before the haiku becomes more of a bystander, lost in the shadow of pyrotechnic prose? There were a few times—mostly with the haibun that embraced (or at least bordered) surrealism—that I felt this way when reading Soundings. “Meeting Magritte” is a case in point. I guess that any poem about the famed surrealist painter would contain a healthy heaping of irrationality, and I don’t mind being swept up into its absurd world. But the haiku leaves me scratching my head. I assume it alludes to Magritte’s “A Philosophy, an Umbrella, and a Glass of Insight,” but it’s really just one more fantastical image, this time set on its own. For me, the piece works just as well (and perhaps even better) as straight prose.

Some of my favorite haibun in Soundings were actually those where Polette channeled his imagination to create tight, simple works with unique viewpoints.

The Wash

Today there are only three pairs of jeans hanging on the clothesline: a trio of workers who have taken off their shirts to reveal the blue-bright torso of a summer sky.

warm night—
a roll of negatives drying
in the dark

Perhaps taking a cue from those drawings that show two different images depending on the viewer’s perspective, here Polette uses an everyday scene—clothes hanging on a washline—to bring out the joy inherent in a bright summer day. And the haiku offers that same spirit of transformation. While younger readers may wonder what a roll of negatives is, I’ve known a few photographers who were drawn to their medium only after seeing images rise magically from film amid a wash of chemicals. As a reader, I’m left wondering which images will appear overnight to greet the next day.

Which goes back to the apparent theme of the book: how much lies below the surface of our daily life, and how much we can discover by looking more closely and maybe using a bit of imagination. In an afterword, Polette offers a few reflections on the art of haibun (some of which were in his “Featured Writer” essay back in cho 17.2), and he notes that “haibun work in a dialectical manner to reconcile opposites: the known and the unknown, the conscious and the unconscious…” As that trio of poets who opened this book would attest, there’s more than meets the eye in this world. Plunge into Soundings and you’ll find a new appreciation for what lies beneath the surface.

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About the Reviewer

Rich Youmans lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Alice. His books include All the Windows Lit (Snapshot Press, 2017) and Head-On (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2018).