Beautiful Assassins
A Review by Barbara Purcell
“Like beauty and state sponsored assassins, haiku are hiding out in plain sight all around us.” This, according to the coauthors of Light Wounds, a crowdfunded collection of hybrid haikus published earlier this year. Toronto photographer Kendall Townend and poet Eva H.D. began their book project in 2015, placing image and language into stark, stunning pairings.
Light Wounds is the outcome of that endeavor: photos on the right, words on the left. But no page numbers—this book is too beautiful for numerical distractions. Instead, square voids of white on which their collaboration exists, like the walls of an art gallery. These 164 pages (if anyone asks) offer minimalist morsels with bite, like a Gorgonzola-stuffed olive whose taste loiters in your mouth.
H.D. (short for Haralambidis-Doherty) is the mythical poet who never published a thing until she published a book. Rotten Perfect Mouth (Mansfield Press) came out in 2015; one of its poems, “38 Michigans,” won the Montreal International Poetry Prize that year. Kendall Townend has been a professional photographer since the 1980s. His hand-printed and bound assemblage of landscapes, The Ravine (1990), is in the Rare Book Collection at the Toronto Reference Library.
This is their first project together, and the third book for each of them. The idea quickly came about in a Toronto cafe: Townend would supply the photos, and H.D. would supply her reaction to those photos via haiku. You would never know when looking at these hybrids, their abstract symbiosis more like a simultaneous ignition. Tiny tomes of five-seven-five syllabic structure in the small center of one page, adjoined by an image on the other; each pairing is as tidy as a padded cell.
Light Wounds is a requiem for the living and a christening for the dead. Townend’s 90 photographs and H.D.’s philosophical dollops straddle this world, and the world that came before, then after. The book’s title is a darkly punny jeu de mots, glinting different meanings from different angles. Is it a reference to scratching? Squinting? A noun or a verb?
LIGHT WOUNDS
You photo graph; in my
parents’ tongues I write with light;
and the light wounds me.
Mystery solved. The trickle-down of intergenerational trauma wins out. “Wounds” is not plural, but peril.
Above this particular haiku, a photo of a full frontal alabaster female set ablaze by an equinox sun, that kind of seasonal light which hits at a slant with pure interrogation. On the right-hand page, three figures on a city street similarly assailed. It is one of the few poems in the collection accompanied by not one but two photos, both images embodying an intense contrast of light and dark. Dark turns to light—but light wounds.
Townend’s photography itself is a poem, coming in and out of focus, awash with shadow and life. A rumination of the sky, or a steeple piercing that sky; double exposures disguising mortality and single-use confetti cannons shot at a gender reveal. Each image is a documentation of impermanence, starting with the cover photo: a stigmata of light that opens bright like a wound.
H.D., whose poem, “Bonedog,” was featured in Charlie Kaufman’s 2020 psychological thriller, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, is a master of the austere. Her haikus are not unlike the time-warped blizzard in which the film takes place; a sort of zero-visbility infinity. In the film, as in this book, her language expands outward into the snowy ether of what we still know, but no longer see.
We have the wondrously crude:
AFTER NOVEMBER RAIN
Splay-faced, the royal
Purple bougainvillea
deepthroating sunshine.
The refreshingly honest:
SHORT A PISTOL
Every time I hear
someone is pregnant, I want
to blow my brains out.
And the succinctly immeasurable:
CONJUGATION OF AN ABSENCE
I wasn’t there for
them. I haven’t been there. I
I will not be there, soon.
Each one hits like a punchline, well-crafted and perfectly timed. H.D. implicitly understands that poetry and comedy share the same mic. She delights in breaking the rules. Sometimes a haiku’s title is longer than the haiku itself. Sometimes a haiku is simply a sentence strategically broken up:
HE WAS ONCE OLDER
One of the things I
hate most about the dead is
catching up to them.
And sometimes a haiku is not a haiku at all, but a cross-pollination of Chucks:
THE RAIN GETS CHUCK NORRIS (1947)
Whenever people
mention Chuck Norris, I think
of Chuck Yeager, who
broke the sound barrier just
yesterday, his hair on fire.
(Other notable figures of historical kitsch include: Debra Winger, Sandy Koufax, Iggy Pop, and Hegel.)
My favorite stuffed olive in the collection:
THE CITY WILL FAIL YOU, YOU WILL REMAIN UNLOVED
Winter-white skyscape
Of used highway, smoke. Not in
shreds: I am a shred.
The title alone deserves airtime on a Times Square Jumbotron. Townend’s accompanying photo is a soft blur of urban streetscape, some fur-lined hood caught in the lower right-hand corner like a still-hopeful ghost.
If H.D.’s poems tend toward existential bleakness, then Townend’s photos pull us back from the brink. Skillfully skirting the sublime, his images lend the beauty to her poetry as they both quietly carry out the hit. From there, the hybrid haiku is born: Light Wounds is a most beautiful assassin.
Light wounds
By Eva H.D. and Kendall Townend
164 pp.
$35.00
Barbara Purcell an Austin-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in the Austin Chronicle, Canadian Art, Glasstire, and Sightlines Magazine, among others. She is the author of Black Ice: Poems (Fly by Night Press, 2006) and has contributed to three anthologies including Word: An Anthology by A Gathering of the Tribes. She is a graduate of Skidmore College and a native of North Jersey.