Book Reviews

WHR December 2019

Book Reviews

Walk with Gandhi: Bóthar na Saoirse, Haiku & Text by Gabriel Rosenstock, Illustrations by Masood Hussain, First Published in 2019 by Gandhi 150 Ireland, Paperback ISBN 978-1-9162254-0-4, Hardback ISBN 978-1-9162254-2-8, Ebook ISBN 978-1-9162254-1-1

Gabriel Rosenstock has done it again! This idiosyncratic (praise) author has been known to make distinct contributions to the development of modern haiku by exploring innovative content, expression and presentation of the genre. This time, he focused on the father of modern and independent India on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth. If haiku is proved to be capable of making sense of the story of such a giant of the figure, Mahatma Gandhi, it is altogether a good thing for the form which was born in Japan and has now spread across the world. Rosenstock’s haiku is accompanied by his own insightful texts about different pages of Gandhi’s 78 years of life. A very moving picture book for all generations, as it were, it has another hero in the shape of renowned Kashmiri artist Masood Hussain who has made Gandhi’s life come alive by filling the pages with powerful and vivid watercolour pictures depicting episodes of the life of this extraordinary man. The collaboration of these two talented men has produced a rare book to be cherished forever.

A Thousand Years – The Haiku and Love Letters of Chiyo-ni (1703-1775), 2018, Marco Fraticelli, published by Catkin Press, ISBN 978-1-928163-27-5

It has to be said first and foremost that the title of this book is misleading, verging on

falsehood. The author has written to me to warn this point and to make it clear that the haiku poems are translations of Chiyo-ni’s original haiku poems but that the letters are in fact written fictitiously by himself, imagining “…what Chiyo was living, during the days that her haiku were written.” Before reading his warning, I was unusually excited as I believed that some recent research had made a new discovery about letters written by this special but rather elusive poetess. So, my disappointment was somewhat significant. The warning is given in the preface in an imaginative way and in the afterword in more straightforward and clearer way.

That said, the book does transport us to an interesting space where we are entertained by imagined stories about Chiyo-ni’s daily life around her love affairs. Each episode is accompanied by a haiku by Chiyo-ni, making it rather like a haibun (except the last chapter where only haiku are presented). It is an interesting try and to me it seems to have been successful.