Book of the Week – & Y Not by Stanley Pelter
What do you expect when you open a haibun collection? A travel narrative? A reflective domestic moment followed by a single haiku? If so, & Y Not will unsettle that expectation from the first pages.
Stanley Pelter’s illustrated haibun volume refuses comfort. It announces itself as exploratory, argumentative, and experimental. In the Introduction, Pelter questions inherited assumptions about haibun, urging writers and readers not to “pin down, fix and ascribe formal and structural differences” too quickly. Haibun, for him, is still evolving, still volatile.
The opening section, “Firsts,” grounds this ambition in autobiography. A childhood trip to the seaside becomes a meditation on discovery and dislocation. The prose rushes forward in breathless memory, punctuated by haiku such as:
distant seascape
the First fishing boat
a sway of greys
The capitalised “First” signals that this is not merely recollection but an origin myth. Pelter uses repetition, “How hit and miss it all is!”, to frame childhood as accident and revelation. The haiku do not summarise; they fracture and echo the prose, shifting perspective rather than resolving it.
Then comes “ARBEIT MACHT FREI,” where the tonal register darkens abruptly. The prose collapses into fragments, typography widens, repetition intensifies:
work makes free
is set in the stoniest of mines…
The haiku
the vermin head count
journey to that last gasp place
a clank of wheel track
Compress historical horror into three lines, while the prose destabilises moral certainty. Here, Pelter stretches haibun toward political meditation, refusing pastoral restraint. The visual inclusion of the Auschwitz gate (page 23) intensifies the collision between image and text.
Elsewhere, in “The Gift,” the tone shifts again. Gardening becomes a metaphor for inheritance, class, and identity. The haiku
bareback work
with an iris in her hand
she watches
softens the prose’s working-class realism. The narrative voice oscillates between humour and vulnerability, allowing the gift to remain ambiguous. Is it talent, luck, genetics, or survival?
Throughout the book, typography, spacing, capitalisation, and visual art disrupt conventional flow. In “spilling adolescent blood,” syntax fractures into stream-like urgency, mirroring the turbulence of youth. In “surviving the Shadow,” shadows become both historical and psychological states.
What unites the collection is restlessness. Pelter treats haibun not as a fixed marriage of prose and haiku but as a site of tension between history and memory, politics and childhood, confession and critique.
Reading & Y Not is less like strolling a path and more like crossing uneven ground. It demands attention. It asks whether haibun can hold war, ideology, adolescence, gardening, and philosophy without collapsing.
Perhaps the better question is the one implied by the title: if haibun can stretch this far, why not?
You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library. As you explore it, consider which piece most challenges your sense of what haibun can be.
Do you have a full-length or chapbook-length book published in 2021 or earlier that you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details. Haiku featured in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by the THF Digital Librarian, Vidya Premkumar and are used with permission.
