NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

THE PARSLEY BED is Ken Jones' third haibun collection: earlier collections are ARROWS OF STONES (British Haiku Society, 2002) and STALLION'S CRAG (Iron Press, 2003). Containing a number of favourite poems already encountered in the journals Blithe Spirit, Haiku Presence, Simply Haiku, Modern Haiku and Contemporary Haibun Online, the volume is a welcome addition to his list of published works. The collection is divided into five sections of haibun interspersed with sections of haiku.

The title comes from Buson's haiku

	This is all there is
	the path dies out
	at the parsley bed

The first haibun, CLINKER, in Section 1 LIFE AND TIMES sets the tone of the collection. Here Jones reminisces about his childhood in a flashback but takes it into the present day with his first person voice:

There is nothing so dead, so ugly, so misshapen as clinker. Dad would shovel it into the battered zinc bucket and I'd lug the stuff into the yard. Out there, the acrid smell of coal fires on the damp air. "Swan Vestas — The Smoker's Match" and the fire lit. I'd make it roar into life by holding up a newspaper against the fireplace surround, daring it to catch light.

to be my very special friend and tell me all about Life. But I didn't know what to ask him. And he didn't want to say.

The two lines of trees stretch to infinity. And also their reflection. Together we cycle through our dream. Behind the past vanishes in a distant haze. Ahead, the future likewise disappears. "Ghent: 48 km."

	Poplars in mist
	beneath our tyres
	the crisp dead leaves

		Leaning together
		the silver cycles
		the white swans

In Section 2 PEOPLE AND PLACES the lengthy opening haibun PER ARDUA AD ASTRA celebrates Jones' Uncle Jack. The poem contains a vivid description of Jack:

Jack is a heavy, florid man, with bulging eyes. Unseen in the mirror, and Brylcream free, a cockatoo tuft of hair always sticks out at the back. I never tell him. He's all dressed up as usual. Reflections in his shoes, knife edged flannels, and the blue blazer with the brass buttons. The Royal Air Force wings are picked out in gold thread on the breast pocket, from which just enough white handkerchief is allowed to peep out.

In POSTS there is the suggestion that the old gate-posts, boundary posts and other posts, although falling into disrepair, have now become free to be just themselves — though there is the further implication that they will not continue forever, as Jones warns:

But beware of clapping one of these ancients too heartily upon the back. Many have been retired longer than their useful employment. And they rot from the bottom upwards.

Their backs to Llechwedd Diflas — Hill of Despair — the Welsh fight like demons. Thrusting, hacking — men butcher men. Their foemen falter, fall back, turn, and flee. With the rout comes the greatest slaughter.

	Red River —
	running headlong
	through bleached and broken pines

	Ramshackle seat
	a vista
	of fresh molehills

In this Victorian stage-set everything is now twice the size it needs to be, reducing us to midgets. It was servant power that once filled and animated all this echoing space. Deadening the clank of skivvies' buckets the double green baize doors.

Many years ago I met his late lordship strolling in his woods at dusk. A gentle, soft spoken man: "Can I help you?"

	Woodland silence
	a twirling leaf
	takes all its time

His take on folklore is to include himself in the analysis. This poem has various parts: a paragraph or two of Highland history; several paragraphs about his and his companion's own moments of confrontation with the adults who are some eighteen inches high and resemble stone dumbbells; and in the penultimate paragraph he mixes in the real-life stalker, John Cameron:

The stalker, John Cameron, keeps up the old custom. At Bealtaine (May Day), when the flocks were driven up to the high glens, he lifts the family out from their little hut of stones and sods. And at Samhain (Halloween), when everyone returned with their beasts down to the valley grazings, he puts the stone people back inside for the winter, on a freshly cut carpet of reeds.

THE KNIFE GRINDER has to be one of my favourite of Jones' haibun. His leaning towards haywire unreality is captured so beautifully in this work where

The same old pig-tailed hippy, with his faded army surplus fatigues and shamanic accoutrements of bead and bone

It's in moments like these that Jones shines. The skill is in the writing — stealthy sifting of the apparently mundane to create a multi-layered montage while letting the material speak for itself. In PUTTING LEGS ON A SNAKE, the first haibun in THE GRAVE & CONSTANT, the last section of haibun, Jones takes us to the Zen Buddhist meditation centre. In the story, Jones highlights the role he plays in contemplation, in physical work and in his interview with the Master:

Inside the Master's room, incense and aftershave. Nothing to lose, I grow frisky and congratulate him on this seven day production of the Theatre of the Absurd. Each day waiting for Godot. He comes clean. "An idiot captain of a ship of fools".

The jikijitsu prowls down the seated ranks. First the raised shadow of his wake up stick, then his pink feet. From time to time he stops to straighten backs, adjust hands. "Don't sniff!", he roars, "Just dribble!" "WAKE UP!" Thwack! Thwack!

Dividing the sections of haibun are passages of haiku, which are headed in the same manner as the haibun they follow. In his INTRODUCTION Jones stipulates that his haiku

rely on concrete imagery — simple, clear and direct — to show what they have to say, rather than spelling it out.

 
	Since she left
	the whole clothes line
	to myself

	Life and Times  Haiku

		Long illness
		her parked car
		its tyres slowly sinking

		People and Places Haiku

	Summer grasses
	through cracks in tarmac
	planners' dreams

	Grandeur, Folly and Fun Haiku

		A snail
		in the stone lion's jaw
		endless rain

		Dreams, Memories & Imagery Haiku 

	Zen —
	in the raked gravel
	a paw mark

	Grave & Constant Haiku

The immense success of Ken Jones' poetry is his ability to have his cake and eat it — to be conceptually intricate, skipping through the minefields of thought and word, but at the same time to keep his feet on plain, simple, indeed beautiful ground. His mind is rich, subtle, spiritual, certainly an infinitely self-questioning hall of mirrors. He's evolved into one of the finest haibun poets, who is richest where he's simplest.