JAMES BRYANT'S DARK HAIKU SERIES: A RESPONSE

James Bryant’s Dark Haiku series is dead-on (pun intended) in title and content. This is no reading for those in search of fluff and lightness. Being one who is familiar with dwelling in darkness, reading In the Dead of Night (James Bryant’s Dark Haiku Book 1) and You Dark Up My Life (James Bryant’s Dark Haiku Book 2) was just like visiting my familiar vacation cabin without turning on the lights when I got there. Don’t need lights to make your way around Bryant’s Haiku. 

Bryant sticks with the 5-7-5 format of the “original” Haiku form, but that is the only restriction he appears to put on himself. Contrary to direction from my poetry Guru, J R Turek, Bryant names his Haiku, he rhymes his Haiku, peppers them with punctuation, and middle-fingers other conventions. I came across a few references to seasons and climate—perhaps an unintentional nod to the original form. Here’s one from In the Dead of Night:

Hurricane laughter

into the eye of my storm

there is no shelter

And

Niagara falls

from my eyes, the perfect storm

inundating me

My take? The atmosphere is doom, the climate is gloom, and thunderous emotions crash. Yes, in Dead of Night, you’ll bump starkly into Bryant’s naked crystalline longing in the glariness of his core expressions:

Connecting the dots

Because they’re lonely like me

No one to turn to

If you’re a teenager or older, you’ve probably suffered from the fabled broken heart, with fractures from multiple falls that fail to heal. Okay, okay, so shoot me because I like alliteration. Bryant doesn’t mind your scoffing either and rips his chest open with dirty fingernails for you to glimpse the pulsing. He makes it quite plain in the very first Haiku in You Dark Up My Life:

Reach in and tear out

my beating heart, stomp it flat

ground it underfoot

And would you perhaps write something like this if you’d lost your queen somewhere near February 14?

A festering sore

cancer eating at my heart

bloody Valentine

It seems to have become fashionable to drop a large rock into the well of our despair and allow the blood to spill over the side. Some may slip and slide in our viscous fluid. Others may bring a pail for subsequent plasmapheresis. You can only know which you are if/when you embrace James Bryant’s Dark Haiku like your shadow on a sunny day.