Francine Banwarth — Touchstone Distinguished Books Award 2024

Francine Banwarth is the recipient of a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award for 2024 for the volume Bare Necessities (Taylorville, Ill: Brooks Books, 2024).

Commentary from the Panel:

It’s hard to believe that Bare Necessities is the first published haiku collection of accomplished poet & editor Francine Banwarth. It has been a long time coming and was well worth the wait.

This collection of selected haiku is arranged in chronological order spanning 35 years from 1989 to 2024. As such, we get to observe how the forms and themes of Banwarth’s haiku evolved. The Author’s Introduction and Michele Root-Bernstein’s insightful Reader’s Introduction further extend our understanding of the origins and influences that help shape the first-rate haiku that follow.

From beginning to end, the haiku included in this collection are multidimensional.

They are layered in meaning:

giving itself
to the greater go(o)d
raindrop

one bird sings inside another autumn dusk

darkness
I lock
myself in

They are lush in sound:

water calls them
out of the sky
wing-worn geese

to know the light
the way a leaf
falls through it

spring morning
the sweetness of the pasture
in the cream

milkweed silk parsed into syllables of light

They are evocative of heart and mind:

a circle of light
the long necks of swans
                   dipping in

late winter twilight
he comes home
without the dog

butterfly garden…
a big voice answers
a small one

newborn’s death date no wind to speak of

And they are not without their humor:

flesh and guts
the pumpkin
stares back at me

The advantage of a 35-year retrospective is the opportunity to discover and follow a wide variety of thematic paths through a landscape of time. Whether by season or image, life stages & experience, family & relationship, or by other poetic elements, each exploration invites reading and re-reading, which can reframe and offer new perspectives that yield rewarding results. Following different paths allows haiku, which may have been underappreciated in one reading, to rise up and reverberate in another. Haiku encountered at the trail’s end can ripple back to those encountered at the beginning and create for the reader an ever-deepening experience.

One such example is the rich vein of recurring moon imagery in Banwarth’s haiku. Her moons share a deep connection with expression itself. They appear where words are inadequate or don’t yet exist. They substitute for that which is not quite language-able. They are present or missing depending on what the speaker chooses to reveal or keep hidden.

solace
the moon
sometimes

holding my thoughts
in moonlight
his point of view

no moon tonight
I tell him what
he wants to hear

moon under the clouds
the things we talk about
when our eyes don’t meet

enough said
the moon rises
out of the sea

Bare Necessities is not a book to be shelved. It is one of those haiku collections to keep close at hand and revisit often.

See the complete list of winners of both Individual Poem Awards and Distinguished Books Awards in the Touchstone Archives.