In Days to Come
In Days to Come, by Lisa Timpf, is the type of book that makes one wish poetry was more widely read and appreciated. Timpf’s writing has a tone that slips right into the conscience, leaving one with the feeling that they are listening to a childhood friend. At once conversational, the narratives are layered with wise, parental messages, simultaneously making one feel at home while casting the world in a slightly different light.
In Days to Come combines poetry, specifically haiku, with snippets of prose, in a Japanese form called haibun. Despite the fact that the micro narratives are written in prosaic form, the music of poetry shines through just as clearly as it would in any book of poetry one might read. Indeed, in the foreword, Lisa Timpf admits that some of the short prose accompanying the haiku were once free verse poems that she modified to fit the haibun form.
Timpf’s book is separated into four sections: Terra, Terra; Location Shadows; Alien Encounters; and New Worlds. Section 1 deals with mundane reality made otherworldly within this blue dome we call Earth. One of the poems, Dreams, offers a surreal variety of situations and ends each passage with the narrative voice being uncertain of the reality of the moment: “You are charging down the stairwell faster than feels safe, urged on by the thunder of your pursuers’ booted feet. You have no idea why you are here. Why they are chasing you.”
Hair of the Dog answers the longing hope of all those who have lost beloved pets. “Maybe the dogs who loved us and were loved in turn, rise and shake themselves, now and then, to send glittering reminders of their past selves spinning down, the strands of hair making their way like feathers…till they find their way to their masters.”
Some of the most memorable haibun happen in Section 3: Alien Encounters, and Section 4: New Worlds. Timpf’s conversational tone coupled with the science fiction aspects of the haibun make for poetic narratives that feel like actual diaries from creatures not of this world, and of people who have travelled far beyond Earth. Readers are introduced to voices that can portray curious innocence, such as the stranded character in One Special Night, which reads, “Hallowe’en is his favorite holiday. It takes his mind off his situation…Man, he thinks, If I had a dollar for every time someone said, ‘Great costume!’, I could afford to fix my ship.”
Other haibun reveal unheard warnings to the human race from intelligent sentiences, such as in We Wish You Luck. These aliens came to reveal something to us but have unable to get the communication just right: “It doesn’t help that our bodies lack the appropriate focalization structure to reproduce your language, forcing us to resort to speaking soul to soul.”
Timpf is brilliant at condensing so much into such a limited word count, as is evident in Wrong Place, Wrong Time. Alien invasions have never been so frightfully drawn as in this haibun: “Back then, we did not know that doom had already marked us for its own, cast its red blaze upon our doors even as we dance to the vala-vala band’s clangs and chimes, the barga-drums beating like a pulse, our feet stomping the ochre earth in rhythm beside the leaping flames.”
We highly recommend In Days to Come, a favorite of poetry books we’ve read by one of our favorite discovered poets, Lisa Timpf.
