Salamander Street: a view of Leith in twenty-one haiku by James Roderick Burns
Pinhole Poetry, 2024
James Roderick Burns is a writer with an impressive literary history, often in short forms of prose and poetry. He has been particularly busy in recent years, with his most recent offerings being a book of haiku, Crows At Dusk (2023); a collection of flash fiction, To Say Nothing of the Dog (2023); and a mix of short form and prose poems in Chopped Liver (2022). His work is characterized by a talent for concision and precision, a deftness of touch, and an almost architectural sharpness when it comes to the delineation of image. Burns’s latest publication, a stylishly presented chapbook, Salamander Street: a view of Leith in twenty-one haiku, is an excellent vehicle for his literary abilities.
Salamander Street is divided into three sections consisting of seven haiku, titled (in order) “North,” “East,” and “South,” referring to districts of Leith. (Apparently, as an introductory note makes clear, “no part of Leith could reasonably be considered west.”)
The “North” section commences with a suitably arresting flourish of energy:
Up and away—
alleyful of feathers
whirls into life
The haiku sequence continues like a montage of cinematic snippets, in which the individual poems typically focus upon the natural world and the impinging human/built environment.
“East,” while mainly focusing upon fauna and flora, ends with a strikingly beautiful piece involving a massive human construction:
From the nave
of the cathedral—
a moth, a sunbeam
“South” commences with an elegantly poetic depiction, couched in terms of fauna:
Bumblebee lights
winking on, off—
night taxis
A lovely lightness is evident in the final haiku, which fittingly brings the collection to its conclusion with a whirling image harking back to the opening poem:
No rest
for the leaf whirled
to the top floor
So often, poetry chapbooks are viewed as a sampler of a poet’s work, the literary equivalent of an amuse-bouche designed to give a good idea of the writer’s “style” (for want of a better word). This view is generally accurate when it comes to such publications. That said, Salamander Street is considerably more, in terms of its impact—Burns’s wonderful little book stands as something substantial and satisfying, being a beautifully constructed haiku series that does considerably more literary “heavy lifting” than one has any right to expect given its small size.
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Kevin Densley is an Australian poet whose work has appeared in Australian, English, and American print journals, as well as numerous online venues. Densley’s latest poetry collection, his fifth, Please Feed the Macaws… I’m Feeling Too Indolent, was published by Ginninderra Press in late 2023.