The Heron's Nest

Editors' Choices

The Heron's Nest Award

It seems to me that Chad Lee Robinson succeeds, time after time, in bringing me into a landscape where his reality and my imagination naturally meet.

I live in an area where thoroughbred horses are raised and I have no trouble picturing this. But the mention of prairie wind takes me from the rolling hills of my home to great open spaces. I imagine a wind that is unstopped and the characterization of it as "with muscle" seems instantly and entirely plausible.

It took me several readings before I realized there are no horses depicted in this verse. The identification of horse and wind is so intense that I feel as if both are present but this is not "horses in a pasture" but the pasture land itself. The presence and absence of horses vie with each other for resonance and the resulting frisson between these possibilities has its own sort of muscle tension.

I've always felt that the best version of English-language haiku was one in which the poem registers first as clear sense images, such as "horse," "pasture," "prairie" and "muscle." And then I look for an open sense of "something more," a stimulation of intuition that bypasses rational questions such as what, where, why and how. Poems that seem intent on raising a question that the reader is expected to answer can be enjoyable but, for me, are a lesser version of haiku. The longer that sense of "something more" can linger without resolving into an answer, the better I like it.

How does a haiku manage to be both obvious and immediate to the senses while putting off rational thought in favor of intuition? There are endless varieties of strategy for this. What I see here is the seamless interpenetration of "muscle" as applicable to both "horse" and "prairie wind." To be in the present moment is to be surprised. How does this poem surprise us? By so conflating the power of a horse and of the wind that we see those energies for what they are, aspects of a single entity.

Seeing them again as distinct and separate entities stimulates thoughts. The thoughts that come to me relate to the way in which "horsepower" is becoming a thing of the past while "wind power," one way or another, is a preview of the future.

Having thought about it, I just want to return and spend some here/now time in that place where the wind flexes its muscle and the horses are swift in their presence, swift in their absence.

John Stevenson
December 2020