Island Books
Poetic words to ponder

By Ann M. Sato

"PORTABLE PLANET" Poems by Eric Paul Shaffer, Leaping Dog Press, paperback, $14.95

With the humor that often glimmers momentarily in his poems, Eric Paul Shaffer styles himself "the other Maui poet," the first Maui poet, of course, being the much-awarded W. S. Merwin.

And perhaps, though his published work as yet has little to do with Hawai'i, Shaffer may someday become known in this way.

To his advantage for achieving wider recognition, outside the too-narrow world of poets and their publishers, is the approachability of his poems. This is not necessarily a compliment in poetic circles, where impenetrability seems often to be taken as a mark of profundity. It says that Shaffer's work is more of the "clear pool" school. That is, many of the poems appear to be straightforward and "about" something, as a pool seems as transparent as glass.

But just as there are ripples and refractions in pools, Shaffer's poems about the death of his dog, or his language difficulties while living in Okinawa or the day he glimpsed a cougar (or did he?) in Yosemite are layered and allusive/elusive.

As well, Shaffer's poems frequently have a Zen koan quality: spare as a monk's cell, as full of meaning as a master's smile. Often, there is a little flicker of something at the end — an ironic turning back in the last line, a contradiction or a challenge. There is a moment, in "Cougar and Rocks, Yosemite National Park," when the animal turns with a twitch of the tail, regarding the viewer briefly before disappearing. Shaffer often, too, seems to lash a sinuous tail and make eye contact just before dropping from sight.

"Portable Planet," released late last year, is a collection in three parts, as Shaffer explains in the foreword: "Familiar, Far," written when he was living in the western United States; "The Western Room," a fragmentary diary of his early years as an inarticulate observer living in Okinawa; and "The Rush Through Blue," from his later years in Japan. (He spent eight years on the island before moving here.) His next book, due out soon, is "Living in the Monastery, Working in the Kitchen," written in the guise of the poet-monk Shih-Te.

Just as builders must speak of wood, understand it, work with it, relish it, hate it at times, so poets often speak of words, their tools. This collection contains several poems about poems, and they are among the richest veins here.

There is "How I Read Poetry":

"When I finish reading/the book/I crumple/the sales slip/I used/to mark my place/and throw it away." Here is the Zen quality: the homely sales slip, the symbol of commerce, anti-poetry, seduced into the body of a poem. The most disposable of things wrapped in the most resonant of arts. What are we to understand? That poems, too, are consumables? That poetry is beyond price? That there is a time after reading for crumpling?

There is "Instructions for Your First Poem," in which the child, the new reader, is directed to "use the poem over and over again, to play with it, and learn from it and, finally, like children marking their growth with a pencil on a door frame, to measure her growth against it.

And there is "Death Mask in Red for Allen Ginsberg: April 5, 1997."

"Poetry is a stop sign/ — either you get it or you don't./Surprisingly few do./After all, how many drivers/every really come/to a complete stop?"

Shaffer's poems do require a stop, a slow second reading, time to turn an image over, to tug at it and roll it around on the tongue.

"The world works really well this way/with a little english on it," he concludes. Shaffer demands of his reader some mental english, a swift, sideways take where a straightforward interpretation would be to miss the mark.

"THE QUIETEST SINGING," edited by Darrell H. Y. Lum, Joseph Stanton and Estelle Enoki. University of Hawai'i Press, paperback, $18

The theme of this intriguing anthology of poems, short stories and literary fragments by winners of the Hawai'i Award for Literature is "unrepresented voices in Hawai'i, past, present and future."

There is the single-parent family in Ian MacMillan's short story who must scam their Enchanted Lakes neighbors to survive, selling fund-raiser candy for a fake cause until the son of the house finds a solution to their plight. There is the woman who, in Victoria Kneubeul's futuristic tale, learns to her shock that she in the in vitro mother of almost the entire Hawaiian nation, and must come to accept it. There is Eric Chock's interesting crafted freestyle poem about a man's bizarre elderly neighbor, George, who, when he dies, leaves an unexpected hole in the community. There is Phyllis Hogue's character, Jian Hui, a Chinese woman struggling to learn English, whose awkward phrasings in her letters to an American friend reveal truths in a way that proper English would not.

The title is derived from Cathy Song's painful and sensuous poem, "The Sister," in which "the voice of the quietest singing" draws two lonely, alienated people together for a brief respite before banishment.

The term brings to mind that "still, small voice" within that is the truest one, the one that does not need to clamor, that perhaps cannot do so, but that tells us what we need to know if only we would listen. It speaks also of this book's theme: the voices to which society does not listen, that are shouted down or stifled, but who also have a truth to tell.