Jeanine Hall Gailey
She Returns to the Floating World
Rebirth in a Different Tongue:
Japanese Fairy-tales in American Verse
by
Gina Barnard
Jeannine
Hall Gailey’s second book, She Returns to the Floating World, (Kitsune
Books 2011) is a collection inspired by and that recreates Japanese folk-tales,
anime, and Shinto spirits to evoke a Japanese world within reach for readers in
English.
She
frames the book with the tale of the kitsune, a fox who shapeshifts
into women. With vivid sensory detail, Gailey invites
us into the Fox-wife’s world with descriptions such as, the “smell of smashed
leaves underfoot,” “the curl beneath the bedsheets,”
and “our noses were flames in the forest. The light of torn paper lanterns is
never true, the moonlight uneven.” Also the haunting detail of the “taste of
rust in the mouths” reverberates throughout the book.
Then
we are shifted into the fox-wife’s husband’s perspective. In “The Fox-Wife’s
Husband Considers the Warning Signs,” he sees the fox-wife gnawing on her
forearm; he says, “sometimes when you thought you were
alone, you gnawed on your forearm. // You kept a
collection of bones in the house.”
Also,
Gailey is deft through crafting and recreating the
Japanese haibun
form. Her haibun
poems echo each other throughout the book, weaving readers deeper into these
tales. In the seventeenth-century, poet Bashō
popularized the haibun
form in The Narrow Road to the Deep
North, which were travel sketches interspersed
with short form haiku. In the haibun form,
prose is juxtaposed against a short poem, haiku.
A successful haibun
creates a layered effect—the essence of the lyric moment in the short haiku is
emphasized by the build-up in the prose leading up to the haiku.
The
poems in She Returns to the Floating
World shape Gailey’s Floating World, echoing each
other, allowing readers to escape into these worlds much like the original
Floating World’s purpose—to offer escape and pleasure.