Kirjahaku

Growing from a year-long commitment to write one haiku a day, Catstrawe ranges through family history and female relationships, the stimulation of travel and the inspiration to found in the immediate environment, politics and the world situation, but always, at its heart, the experience of living with cancer. Quickly outgrowing the limitations of seventeen syllables to explorer more extended forms, this is a book about living life to the full in the face of the inevitability of death.

Lucid, linguistically dextrous, and woven through with Welsh phrases, and words and passages in French, this exquisitely observed sequence of haiku and haibun was written during lockdown, though only refers to Covid elliptically. There is nothing obvious here—instead there are connections—with nature, with relationships, with what is lost and what is saved.

Based in part on the author’s mother’s handwritten memoirs, this novel is an act of bricolage in which the narrator keeps finding gaps in the materials. We desire to regain the past, but every time we attempt it we fabricate it anew. Through various narrative voices, the author discovers a different sense of her mother than she held during her lifetime. This is a type of biographical revisionism. We cannot know the past, especially that of our mothers, but we can re-member them. Meticulously researched, this book constitutes an extended meditation on memory, the strength of memory and its fallibility.