Jianqing Zheng is an accomplished poet and editor with immense and innovative contributions to English literature. His scholarly writing, Japanese short poems and enduring integrity in literature have been well received by the leading journals. The current collection, Dreaminations, embodies images of nature intertwined with human feelings, love, emotions, and humor. The title reads like a poetic intuition. I could discover the appropriation of it as Zheng unfolds the narration of self, human experience, illuminating and studded with the beauty of nature, mountains, trees, a host of wonderful creatures, birds and animals. The symbiosis of prose and verse in haibun and tanka prose, based on observations and experience of the natural world, lands readers as if in the domain of the fairy-tale's enlightenment.

 

Zheng interweaves his experience, seasonal references, unfolding the hidden natural beauty along with the socio-geographical reference with an enduring experience of “a moment of dreamination” in the haibun, “Second Looking.”

 

Second Looking

 

We walked into the Yatsu Rose Garden in Narashino before it was closed, surprised to find most roses had lost their bloom and looked like crepe paper. After looking at the faded roses of pink, white, blue, green, yellow, and purple, we paused by a red one named Dream, persistent in holding its color to offer us a moment of dreamination. On our way back to the hotel, the red twilight bloomed roses all over the western sky.

 

falling leaf

its shadow waits

for the touch

 

Nature’s Poet

 

Bruce Ross, in his preface to Haiku Moment, writes “The movement from a special attention toward a non-human realm to some kind of union with that nature is a central facet of Japanese culture.” Dreaminations includes vignettes of personal experiences in the form of flash- memoirs, travel accounts to different places, enriched with nature-centric and non-human (animals, birds, trees etc) reference. “Touch” is an interesting, playful haibun of catching fireflies. At the end, he writes: “Now sunset dims out behind weeping willows, and his son dims into a silhouette surrounded by fireflies sparkling like stars.” The concluding haiku swings to the celestial horizon with an outstanding juxtaposition:

         

 July 4—

a constellation

of fireworks

 

Poetization

 

The poet skillfully captures the beauty of nature through his craftsmanship, expressing it with a gentle flow and a resonant poetic style. His prose poems are both lyrical and lively, showcasing rich textual virtuosity. Zheng is a master storyteller and a crafty wordsmith. He uses similes, assimilating nature with human expression:

 

the rain fell on my umbrella like crying tears, their voices lap like wavelets, the word rolls like a coin, etc.

 

Zheng’s emotional experience while leaving the village has been quite touching. He juxtaposes his feelings and compares the rain to tears, as seen in “Haibun: Goodbye.” Similarly, he reminisces about the youthful days of his ailing uncle with his aunt. He recalls their sweet interactions as “voices lap like wavelets” (Haibun: Quiet Departure). Equally, ‘the word rolls like a coin” (Haibn: Notes) is very imagistic. The haibun humorously narrates the ascent through interactions between two men from different parts of the world.

 

The skill of link and shift has been the hallmark of his haibun and tanka prose. The phrases and poetic idioms are some of the literary enrichments, the poet quite often love to cite: a farewell blues, slanting sun, cotton-soft voice, dissolves my sadness, empty shine of silence, and so on.

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“Footsteps echo the long past”, the concluding line of the emotional prose of haibun “Old Field Road Sign, Mount Locust, Mississippi” is one of the linguistic spotlights.

 

The haibun, “River,” is unique in its content, composition and literary curriculum, albeit it looks a bit over narrative to start with, but later it plunges into the inimitable best. Readers will cherish the lines as Zheng philosophically elucidates: “Life continues over time like a river flowing in the past, present, future, and infinity. William Butler Yeats yearned to return to Innisfree when lake water was lapping “in the deep heart’s core;” T. S. Eliot beheld the co-existence of individuality and eternity in “The river is within us, the sea is all about us; ….”  The river is a metaphor for him. The poet spent time staying close to the riverside and enjoyed the beauty of nature. The last line: “Step twice into the river for tranquility and confluence and let it flow past us, within us, be us!” is a brilliant symbiosis of linguistic and inherent spiritual heritage.

 

Emotional Memories

 

Zheng ponders the emotional relationship with the place of his origin. “Where Are You From?” is a haibun with socio-political inking and cross-cultural importance. He interrogates himself: “Geographically, everyone has an origin and knows where they are from. Yet, the question of “where are you from?” can branch out into different ones if we think beyond the box, the self, the race, or the country: Are we from Earth or elsewhere?”

 

prayer time

eyes closed

on second coming

 

He reconciled himself and says: “It’s a small wonder how I’ve changed, unwittingly, from a migrating bird to a resident bird building a nest in the Delta, and how time has flown away so unnoticeably…” (Haibun: Mapping the Self). Zheng loves to stay in Mississippi, the place the poet likes so much:

 

“Mississippi sounds feminine… It’s fertile soil for art and creative expression… It’s fertile soil for art and creative expression. Mississippi is rooted in the mind of everyone who’s lived in or visited it and kept for it a fire that never goes out. This sense of place stimulates writing…” The poet concludes with a philosophical tenor:

 

alone time

free from and

for the self

 

There has been an emotional touch of the country of birth, no matter how far one may be away.  Zheng recalls in haibun “River”: “I was born and grew up by the Long River in China. I swam in it, caught shrimp from it, wrote poems about it. Many evenings, I walked five minutes to the riverside to jog or enjoy a moment of being by the river. Now I live an hour away from the Mississippi, another long river. I feel the two rivers flow in me. Their confluence makes me associate one in my eyes with the other in my memory.”

 

He cherishes his memories of his country of origin, China, and expresses this in his writing through memorable pieces. “Goodbye” haibun is one of the classical ones. Zheng portrays the visual image of the village with a profound poetic style:

 

looking back

my muddy footprints

run toward me

 

Multifarious Poetry

 

The poets could articulate the hybrid genre through a spectrum of topics that closely relate to the readers. Zheng’s compositions often tell family-oriented stories intertwined with nature and subtle humor, as depicted in “A Delta Weekend” and “Not in Vain.” He has a remarkable ability to transform common event into a memorable piece. The art lies in assimilating the prose narration with the verse as portrayed in tanka prose “Transference”:

 

“…A shocking pain pierces my upper arm. Weeks later, pain takes the other arm. Since both arms are like brittle branches unable to bend, I rub my back itch against the door frame like a bear scratching against a tree trunk. My wife suggests swaying my arms slowly to release the tension, but they move like wipers on broken pivot nuts…” The art of link and shift is superb by poetically transporting the visual imagery:

 

rising sun /a redheaded /woodpecker /knocks around /a dead branch

 

Tanka prose writer, Charles D. Tarlton remarks, “When the prose provokes a verse that has scoured the surfaces and plumbed the depths of the prose and found an idea that could only be expressed in verse, then the combination of the two expressions on the same page allows the reader to go there, to climb up to that new vista…”

 

“Quite Departure” is an emotionally filled story of a cancer patient breathing his last on the lap of nature. Breeze of emotion drifts gently, creating “wavy white” along the shore.

 

deep autumn

reeds along the shore

wavy white

 

Zheng introduced a unique literary art, incorporating references from iconic poets into haibun and tanka prose. The piece “Dream Song to the Comps” is worth reading for its richness, humor and gentle flow with resonance:

 

“Night after night Plath blinks her sad eyes when Berryman sings his dream songs. Ashbery projects “the meaning as hard as” a stone cottage for me to break in when Joyce appears from nowhere to lead me into a maze where I wander like Mr. Bloom…Eliot, who’s conducting Four Quartets, offers his poetic advice: “The beginning is often the end.” Pound cuts in, “No, the end should be the beginning.”… I wake up with Whitman’s “Song of Myself” ringing in my ears…”

 

It appears that the poet is a photographer of nature’s delights: “As I hold up my camera, a loud chorus of cicadas rises overhead like cheers.” He shares the gleeful moment with an overwhelming sense of intimacy (Haibun: In the Right Place at the Right Time):  

 

camping night

dream of our first kiss

a lightning bug    

 

“Angling” is a contemporary geopolitical piece with satire. Zheng’s poems are often rich with day-to-day happenings with a touch of playfulness. The one that caught my attention is the haibun “Homework.” The art of juxtaposition in the concluding haiku is indeed a pragmatic one with subtle sensuality.

 

Therapeutic Aspects

 

In “Adjusting the Self”, Zheng deftly blends the poem with prose, haiku and tanka. In the beginning, his narration of breakfast “peanut butter banana sandwiches and a fruit salad with pecans and raisins…” Zheng further writes, “Reading is a pleasure and gives me a break to decompress and reset my mind to creative thinking.” He defines haiku in a unique sense of therapy value:

 

“Although haiku is as short as a bird’s chirp, reading a fine haiku still requires a slowdown, a momentary stay, a snapshot in the mind’s eye to gain an aesthetic taste… In a sense, haiku writing and reading, like a plate of fresh fruit salad, delights the mind.”

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prescription

for staying healthy…

one haiku a day

 

I could sense the allusion of Bashō’s iconic haiku the “Old Pond” in the haibun, “Mind Flash”:

 

still pond

a Zen moment

for koi

 

Conclusion

 

The exhilarating and eclectic collection is a testament to revisiting nature. Listen to the muse of rivers, the resonance of silence from mountains, the sparks of fireflies, the woodpecker’s rhythmic notes, and the seagulls’ wings are some of the spectacular visual paintings he crowns to the beauty of sea and sky. These are the poetic hallmarks and enriched literary tapestry that Zheng carefully explores. The family-centric narration, with his quest for the beauty of nature, offers a warm welcome to his poetic ingenuity in the hybrid literature.