Peace and War: A Collection of Haiku from Israel, by Rick Black

Afterward, by Kwame Dawes

The most striking thing about the haiku that Rick Black has published here is their fine aesthetics of contradiction in a land that is at once beautiful and startlingly ugly, a world that achieves peacefulness even while war is constantly present.

To see this world, to truly engage this world, the poet somehow has to maintain a dual vision. It is interesting to me that Black’s haiku therefore have a peculiar affinity with the parallelisms of the Hebraic verses that we see in the Book of Proverbs and the Psalms. Yet his haiku are scrupulously focused on the visual, on the engagement with the external world—as if by concentrating on what is external, somehow, sentiment is arrested, and a distilled truth emerges.

In these poems about Israel, there is such a loaded narrative behind them, a narrative so old, so ancient and so rich with ironies and contradictions that it emerges from the understatement of the form.

I recommend that you read these haiku slowly, very slowly, pausing, returning to the beginning again and again and remaking your path to the end. I assure you that you will find grace notes here that will last for a long time. And I am almost certain that in the end you will forgive and embrace the almost didactic plea for hope in the final verse in the collection. In many ways, it will become for you, as it has for me, a deeply felt prayer.

Kwame Dawes
Louise Fry Scudder Professor and Distinguished Poet in Residence
University of South Carolina
Columbia, South Carolina, U.S.A.