My dear friend Elizabeth Searle Lamb died in February, 2005. She was almost ninety years old, and well-known internationally as a haiku poet. She also wrote the Japanese forms of tanka, renga, and haibun. However, she began her poetic career writing conventional length lyric poetry in the modernist tradition--poetry which showed influences from Stephen Vincent Bennett to Amy Lowell. And she returned to the longer poem towards the end of her writing career, poems that seemed influenced by visionary dream states such as an acupuncture treatment or the hours before dawn.
Elizabeth Lamb was constantly tidying and sorting her study, but it was somewhat of a nemesis. Like many creative artists, she assembled notes and images that meant something to her—and were possible sources of inspiration. Her working notebooks were often pasted with postcards, book reviews, marginalia. She left numerous unpublished manuscripts in clear order. Less clear were the slips of paper and loose folders of haiku—finished and unfinished.
What is presented here is a selection of some of her less known work. The lyric poems all come from a manuscript she had titled THE TIME FLOW POEMS. These do indeed range in time and place, from the Amazon to New York City. I think the majority of them were written during or just after her sojourn in Manhattan’s Washington Square in Greenwich Village in the 1970’s, even when they look back to earlier times in Latin America. Elizabeth Lamb wrote a haiku sequence on the Bust of Sylvette which was published as its own book. The force of her interest in the work is made obvious by another treatment—the poem here.
The New Year was a particularly favorite subject of Lamb’s for haiku. Two haiku are presented with Elizabeth Lamb’s creative process intact.
In ‘Orion’ she began with
Orion ablaze
above the old adobe
New Year’s Eve
and then simply changed one word. But she had also tried the words glows, glowing,
sparkling, and stat-glow before she settled on:
Orion brilliant
above the old adobe
New Year’s Eve
In 'New Year’s Dawn' she wrote
New Year’s dawn
memories (crowd in CROSSED OUT)
crowd in on me
swirl around (fill the air?
from my coffee cup
It was revised as:
dawn of the New Year
how memories crowd in—steam
from the teakettle
Her tanka on Harry Potter also has a quality of freshness even though it refers to ending something. She loved the books and followed them devotedly through the fifth volume.
I hope this selection gives an idea of Elizabeth Lamb’s range as a poet.