Books in Brief

Reviewed by Tish Davis, Rich Youmans

Before the Rules

By John Budan
Self-published through Lulu.com
2024, paperback, 97 pages
ISBN: 978-1-304593-88-7
$15.00
Available on Lulu and Amazon

Before the Rules is John Budan’s second collection of previously published poems. It includes thirty-six tanka prose, forty tanka, and two tanka sequences. Budan isn’t afraid to share his emotions, and his tanka prose covers a wide range of topics. In “Anthophile,” for example, he is charmed by “the amaryllis cushioned incongruously in a rusty coffee can perched on an antique table”; Budan’s awareness of the plant “peaks and morphs into a strong interest” and now each morning he kisses her “lightly on her gorgeous green stem.” This behavior prompts his wife to ask, “How is your girlfriend today?”

The tanka prose concludes with a charming reassurance for his wife:

segments of our life
like drifting petals
caught in the wind
I hold my wife
tightly

The forty stand-alone tanka in this collection typically appear two per page and provide a random separation from the tanka prose. It’s an arrangement that not only pleases the eye, but also allows the preceding tanka prose to linger in the reader’s mind.

Budan’s writing also illustrates an awareness of the Buddhist concept of impermanence, which teaches that “nothing in the universe is essential — that everything that comes also goes, everything that lives, must die, and everything that is created will crumble.” Budan has gifted readers with a meaningful collection.—TD

Excerpt:

Endangered

I walk the freshly plowed field after rain has exposed a detritus of broken tools and relics, mortars and pestles used for grinding camas roots. All these reminders of an ancient culture. Picking up a flint arrowhead, I weld a spiritual connection with the last person to have touched it, so long ago. In another thousand years, will there still be humans to sift through the ashes and shards of my own existence?

time fades
I step lightly
between a world
of now
and then

Four Season Farm

By Jeremy Haworth
Published by Alba Publishing
Uxbridge, United Kingdom
2023, Paperback, 96 pages
ISBN: 978-1-912773-56-5
£18 GBP (includes delivery worldwide)
Ordering Information from the Author

These 90 haibun, written as journal entries across the course of a year, immerse readers in the sights, sounds, and smells of life on an organic farm in Ireland.. Formerly a “townie” whose work life “ticked to the rhythm of scheduled meetings, project deadlines, the daily commute,” he describes a new existence in the rhythms are those of the weather and the seasons.

From the first sowing in February (“I press the tiny black seeds into the moist nothingness of soil”) to the vibrancy of summer harvests—plucking strawberries, snipping leaves, topping and pruning tomato plants—to preparing the soil for winter and harvesting the final crop (brussels sprouts), Haworth’s accounts are as rich as the soil he tills. He describes the daily toils— weeding, killing slugs, shoveling chicken-shit (his wife tells him he “smells like a barn”)—made worse by intense heat and occasional drought. He ponders the cycles and occasional brutality of nature, and ruminates on climate change. He offers self-deprecating accounts of his mishaps (including a few bungles with the farm tractor) and periodic reprimands from the farm’s owner, Liam, who at one point is described as working like “a machine: all horse-power and no heart.”

Haworth offers a few personal glimpses—the death of his grandfather, the birth of a son—but primarily this is a book about life on the farm. (Readers aren’t even made aware of his wife’s pregnancy until October, a month before the baby is born, and even then it is in relation to the unheralded mothering skills of earwigs.) The haiku, at the their best, offer subtle resonances with the prose, but it’s the book’s powerful prose that truly engages and draws readers into “the slow rise of energy through dark matter, jumpstarting a season of growth, the buried seeds popping into life.”—RY

Excerpt:

June 12th

With the burst of energy from the sun, crops all over the farm are skyrocketing and thirsty as ever. Liam spends a good amount of the day flitting around, fixing irrigation lines in place. The long yellow pipes snake across the farm, dribbling water into the dry earth.

“It’s like a symphony,” he explains. “We’re the conductors. The crops are the orchestra, building to a crescendo of ripeness.”

For the rest of the day, I hear music everywhere.

the tremolo
in the peony petals
a humming bee

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