276 Western American Literature Casting into a Cloud: Southwest Haiku. By Elizabeth Searle Lamb. (Fanwood , New Jersey: From Here Press, 1985. 72 pages, $3.95.) Station Stop: A Collection of Haiku and Related Forms. By Richard Tice. (Salt Lake City: Middlewood Press, 1986. 73 pages, $7.95.) Westerners are especially well situated to draw from Native-American, Hispanic, and Oriental traditions. Among Western American writers who have acknowledged profound debts to Asian antecedents, Frank Waters and Gary Snyder are two of the most obvious. Asian influences are deeper and more widespread than maybe readily apparent, however. WalterVan Tilburg Clark, for example, once told me that his single greatest writing influence was Matsuo Basho, the Japanese haikuist and teacher. Walter found in Basho not only potent techniques transferable from haiku to Western American fiction but also what he believed to be fundamentally important attitudes about nature, awareness, and art. During his last years, he even used haiku as his basic teaching tool, with Harold Henderson’s Introduction to Haiku as his primary undergraduate text. Please pardon the longintroduction to a short review, but Asian contribu tions to American literature have not always received their due, and such an appreciation will be helpful, I hope, in responding to two new books which embody Western American experience in haiku form—especially since haiku itself is so widely misunderstood. Elizabeth Searle Lamb’s Casting into a Cloud is a gem of a book, an ideal example of the potential of haiku and its ability to reflect contemporary Western American experience. In the hands of a master like Lamb, the form itself is fluid, able to shape itself to the environment, to adapt itself to the nuances of the unique here-and-now. Lamb is no newcomer to either haiku or the American West. A Santa Fean with ties to the mountains of Southern Colorado, she is a charter member and past-president of the Haiku Society of America, as well as current editor of its international quarterly (Frogpond). Her own haiku have received many awards, as have her essays on the history and nature of haiku in Western languages. She isalso widely regarded for her contribution to renga (linked verse created by poets working as a team) and haibun (a weaving of haiku and prose), as well as for her non-haiku poetry. Casting consists entirely of haiku and haiku sequences of the Southwest, along with delightful Southwestern illustrations by Arizona artist Barbara Gurwitz. Let all who have been misinformed about the nature of haiku check these poems before accepting misleading definitions based on lineation or syllablecount —about as close to the core of haiku as definitions of nursery rhymes are to modern American poetry. In the process, most will appreciate why Lamb is considered one of the highlights of the North American haiku movement. A few examples: a new hearing aid: adjusting it, she tunes in on crickets Reviews 277 far back under a ledge the ancient petroglyph faint water-sound field of wild iris— the pinto pony kicks up its heels in the high meadow moonlight mufflesour horses’hooves, the elk still browsing cry of the peacock the crack in the adobe wall In Station Stop, Utah poet and editor Richard Tice has compressed an eight-year pilgrimage into seventy-three pages of haiku (with two haibun), including sumie illustrations by A. Aiko Horiuchi and some calligraphy by Iizuka Michie, along with an extensive introductory essay in which Mr. Tice offers his views on haiku. Some will welcome Mr. Tice’sperspectives on form, structure, image, time, and suggestiveness, though others may consider the essay too long (over 25% of the book)—agreeing with Mr. Tice that haiku usually “work best when experienced rather than analyzed.” The haiku themselves are divided into four sections, with the first and last set in Japan and the rest divided between the Pacific Coast and the Great Basin, so that his focus is not always as directly related to the Western Ameri can experience as Lamb’s. Tice’s haiku are sometimes unclear simply as poems, also, displaying a tendency to intellectualize and to project a still obscure (or merely personal) meaning into a situation not itself...