A Review of “Haiku Mama”

(because 17 syllable is all you have time to read)

I would love to love Kari Anne Roy’s Haiku Mama. Haiku — a classic Japanese form most often consisting of three lines of five, then seven, then five syllables — is the sole form of poetry I read consistently. Not a fan of the “Oh, fleet, flying crane” variety, I seek the funky/the impudent, the Tokyo/nightlife of haiku. (In Japanese, what we call To-ki-yo is pronounced To-kyo.)

Roy’s pocket-sized volume, with its cheery, red-and-peach cover and alluring subtitle, purported to suit me like white on rice.

Hopes flung like whole fish!/Roy’s splendid idea does/not a great book make.A good book, however, yes. Roy certainly has a sense of humor, and a handful of the 100-plus haiku deliver the promised “laugh-out-loud observations.” My primary issue with Roy’s undertaking is not that her humor veers toward the gross:

Snot on monitor
gives things a nice soft focus
until it flakes off.

Juxtaposing an ephemeral art such as haiku with the mama life of barf and poop and howling offspring, that some good comic contradiction! My primary objection with Roy’s work is that it rarely offers up a true haiku.

Haiku is more than three lines of five, then seven, then five syllables. Each of the three lines needs to present a stand-alone image that, in context of the story told by the haiku, evokes what haiku poet Alexey Andreyev calls “certain bright moments of life” — quixotic…