Peter Yovu — Touchstone Distinguished Books Award 2024

Peter Yovu is the recipient of a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award for 2024 for the volume, shine shadow (Winchester, VA: Red Moon Press 2024).

Commentary from the Panel:

Among the many books we considered for this award, Peter Yovu’s shine shadow was a clear stand-out collection. The poet’s inventive use of language to present wholly unique images rewards the reader on each successive visit to the world Yovu creates. The poems inform and strengthen each other while demonstrating a thought-provoking writing style by a skilled wordsmith. This collection shows us the depth and breadth of what haiku-inspired poems can do. And it serves as an excellent example of how haiku and free verse poetry might coexist.

Bruce Ross, a haiku poet and scholar, wrote in an essay what we feel applies to the skills and accomplishment of Yovu’s most recent collection.

“What needs to happen when experiencing a haiku moment, that heightened experience whether in a meditative, reflective, or exuberant state, is the crafting of an “absolute metaphor” that joins the universal and the particular in stated or unstated imagery to produce a musically phrased dynamic of new awareness.”

Yovu does this with expert regularity. Here is one example:

two ballerinas in one skin a newborn foal

And another example:

taken up by a hawk

every letter of
a snake’s alphabet

In both of these poems, Yovu takes what may be familiar (a foal’s first steps, a hawk capturing a snake) and remakes each into new images that surprise the reader. Additionally, the fact that the snake is actually communicating through its own mysterious alphabet adds another layer to this poem and reinforces Yovu’s larger theme of language and its possibilities.

In addition to the stand-alone short poems, Yovu includes haibun, short free verse poems, and a series of one-line sequences. The haibun that are interspersed throughout the book convey a deep emotional connection to the natural world and the roles we humans play in it. Each haibun succeeds, in part, because of Yovu’s close attention to the interplay between the title, prose, and haiku. Again, multiple readings reward the reader in multiple ways. For example:

First Floor

He died. For a long time it seemed I had taken on his body, and mine was its shadow.

glow-in-the dark-stars
on my bedroom ceiling ---
someone coughing,
                                       above

my father     
                      dying ---
                
                      sun glints on the nail
                      a painting hung from

The reader is left to ruminate on what painting hung on that nail. Where did it go? And what was its significance to the father? In “First Floor” the reader receives only the barest of details to what is an emotionally loaded scene about a much larger absence. And is it also a commentary on “the man upstairs?” Is the coughing from above a comment on how casually life goes on? Is it God simply going about his business? Additionally, there’s the intentional reference to the illness of whoever “he” is who died.

Peter Yovu’s words in shine shadow are striking, no matter what form he chooses to contain them. Yovu’s singular viewpoint is strange and appealing, coaxing the reader from their comfort zone with the alluring force of language. He blurs the conventional definitions of what a haiku is, what a haibun is, and even what a poem is. As a result, readers are sure to find a world as limitless as their own imaginations.

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