Haiku

Barry George

Photo: The Wandering Angel

cold train station -
I’m bundled up like
FDR at Yalta

Categories: Frontpage · poetry

Tags: cold, FDR, haiku

Cathy Nickola // Feb 26, 2009 //

Barry’s haikus often make me laugh with a first reading, but stay with his work long enough, and the pain or longing or achingly beautiful will get you (I’m thinking here of the Tanka Barry wrote about being in a yoga class and noticing a bunion on the foot of a beautiful woman that matches his own). Below the surface of this Haiku is a painful sense of doom, of loneliness and longing, and a touch of near-confessional drama that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Somehow Barry can get away with not completely stepping out of the haiku…he keeps something in himself cool I think to allow this to happen. Barry observes with the power of prayer, and he takes his play seriously like a child who has no idea he’s being watched. I think we read the haiku for its maieutic ability. And the more difficult it is to put into words the feeling, the understanding that arises from the reading , the better the haiku. That one can read Barry’s work and laugh and then pause and then feel deeply something more–well, this is what I describe as a writer being courteous to paradox–every good midwife knows the importance of that! Thanks Barry.

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