The winner of this year’s T.S. Eliot Prize will be announced on Monday. And if word-of-mouth admiration is anything to go by, Zaffar Kunial’s England’s Green (Faber) must be among the favourites.
A few years ago, Kunial’s first collection, Us (Faber, 2018), was also shortlisted. I particularly liked the sequence “Empty Words”. It is written in a haiku stanza of 5-7-5 syllables, where the first and third lines rhyme — here, making a subtly-shifting connection between his English and Kashmiri heritage:
At home in Grasmere —
thin mountain paths have me back,
a boy in Kashmir.
(You can read an earlier version of the poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58567/from-empty-words)
At the time, it interested me that “Empty Words” was the first time I had seen a poet employ a form that I thought Paul Muldoon had invented for his more whimsical pastoral sequence “Hopewell Haiku”, in Hay (Faber, 1998):
A stone at its core,
this snowball’s the porcelain
knob on winter’s door.
But this summer I came across a second-hand book which suggested the rhyming haiku had a longer history in English. A Pepper-Pod: A Haiku Sampler by Shōson (Kenneth Yasuda), first published in the States in 1947, offered American readers an anthology of translated and original haiku in the same form. Here is one on the acoustics of clothmaking, by the eighteenth-century poet Buson:
Here and there I hear
The sound of fulling-mallet
Beating soft and clear.
Yasuda elaborates in an introductory essay on his decision to use rhyme as a way of recreating in English the “haiku tune” of Japanese: it helps to “emphasize the pulsation of feeling and meaning”, to give “concreteness to the haiku form as a frame does to a picture”, and to combine “idea-rhyme” and “sound-rhyme”.
He also discusses the pictorial quality of haiku, suggesting that the ordering of its expression adds a “time element” to the image, which turns a two-dimensional composition into a three-dimensional arrangement of perceptions (as in the Buson haiku, where “The sound of the fulling-mallet” occupies the centre of the scene, with the poet’s perception of its “soft and clear” echo distributed “here and there”).
In England’s Green, Zaffar Kunial continues his “Empty Words” sequence, bringing history into the haiku’s moment of immediacy, so that a rhyme which marks out a space in a landscape also marks a distance over time — including the time between the writing of one book and another:
My father’s Kashmir
ended with a smoky sigh —
its long rhyme with here.