shine shadow: haiku and other short poems of Peter Yovu

Description

“Characterized as much by elements of dream logic (“the dream/that gives me my eyes”) as concrete, sensory images, shine shadow could well be read alongside Michael O’Brien’s Sleeping and Waking, Tomas Transtromer’s The Sorrow Gondola and The Great Enigma, or the shorter poems of Robert Bly. Adding a more fully realized dimension of haiku to this lineage, Yovu’s poems are thoroughly steeped in the “shadow” (“without the presence of which ‘strangeness’ will not be felt”) for which he has argued elsewhere; indeed, it truly “shines” here.”
— from the Preface by Philip Rowland

Winter Dawn (after Tranströmer)

Driving past midnight,
weather closing in, bearing down.
Scenic area. I pull in,
stop, lean back, try to sleep
but the road keeps going, through me,
my eyes are headlamps . . .

Darkness.

There’s a muffled sound like dug earth
tossed onto a coffin lid.

Silence.

Then a brilliance
floods the car as if
the screen of a drive-in theater
was suddenly lit.

*     *     *

dead hawk
the sun
buried in the sky


under a cemetery oak
the book
I haven’t begun


thoughts about death
things I only say
tomorrow

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ISBN: 978-1-958408-51-3
Pages: 108
Size: 6″ x 9″
Binding: perfect softbound
Year Published: 2024

Winner of a 2024 Touchstone Distinguished Books Award from The Haiku Foundation!

“The fifth and final section of Peter Yovu’s shine shadow has as an epigraph the question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’, ascribed to ‘Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, et al’. It’s a question that serves as a reasonable introduction to Yovu’s work as gathered in the book. The question is, of course, an assertion that we know something exists because the observing eye exists, but it is also an invitation to look at the world as something we cannot and must not take for granted.

“In these haiku, haibun, and haiku-adjacent longer poems, Yovu draws us into the something that is and addresses what it is to be and to be perceived, or not, as the case may be:”

The infant

smiles at a face
he’s never seen, his

clear eyes looking out of

a face he’s never seen

“This idea of looking out and seeing what may be your self is a thread that runs through the book: a mirror shows you an old self you’ve been unaware of and which later becomes ‘an aging body/clings to me’, the reflection of a tree in water releases the reflection of birds you hadn’t noticed, and in a train across the platform from your own:”

someone
turns and looks.

I see myself
seen.

I see myself
pulling away.

“Which reminds us that the question could read ‘why is there someone rather than no one?’ The image of the self pulling away also brings us close to another key thread in these poems, the imminence of death:”

under the cemetery oak
the book
I haven’t begun

“This classically open-ended haiku is exemplary of Yovu’s control of the words he places on the page, and that placement is crucial, as in this poem, where the spacing serves as the turning point:”

fish nibbling at my feet
an almost

imperceptible rain

“Unlike many poets working in this area, Yovu attends to the sounds his words make, weaving tensile strands of assonant melody through his poems:”

Early Fall

Dusk. Fewer crickets, but louder.
A tree coughs,
expels a crow.

For a little while
an insect in a tangle
of yellowing grass

makes a noise like
someone trying
to light a match.

“And at this point I realise that I’m quoting more than reviewing, because these poems reveal themselves without my intervention. It’s a beautiful book, and very nicely produced with loads of white space. Go read it.”

— Billy Mills