Beven, K. (2025). The river as Haiku. Blurb. Ebook (£10.00)/Hardcover (£57.34) 

(URL: https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/12348913-the-river-as-haiku)

John T. van Stan II

Cleveland State University, Cleveland, j.vanstan@csuohio.edu

To cite this Review: Van Stan, J.T II. (2025). Review of “The River as Haiku”, Blurb by Keith Beven, Water Alternatives, http://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/boh/item/387-Haiku

I learned hydrology in the Western scientific tradition: remote sensing, equations, models, systems thinking. This is useful and valuable, but over time, such knowledge can crowd and constrain a mind; the world becomes gridded. What begins as clarity risks ossifying into a mindset of detachment and delineation. Eventually, the only honest work left is a form of unlearning: simplifying, questioning delineations, and seeking a cognitive model that is more meaningfully parsimonious – one that makes space for a more open, epistemically humble contemplation. That unlearning led me (via Van Stan and Simmons, 2024) to Keith Beven’s On Landscape essays (2019a, 2019b, 2021). These reflections on uncertainty, attention, and place opened a door, through which I encountered The River as Haiku, the latest in a series of haiku-photography volumes framed by a brief essay on the nature of the form, its Zen Buddhist roots, and English adaptations.

Across 37 compositions at various scales, Beven pairs river-themed landscape photographs with original haiku, each arranged to reflect the verse’s 5/7/5 cadence through vertical triptychs. The images do not ‘serve’ the text, nor does the text ‘explain’ the image; instead they coexist as parallel modes of attention. This visual-poetic symmetry invites contemplation of familiar hydrologic phenomena recast as aesthetic moments. Illuminated mist suspended above a river becomes the visible intersection of energy gradients (radiative, thermal, and topographic). An ice-clad cliff reads as phase transitions caught mid-act, water in transformation and rock under stress. Beven’s visual-lyrical compositions gesture toward something unsettled – perhaps unsettle-able in a Heraclitean sense. One haiku in particular, paired with a photograph of ice, captures a tension that underlies much of the work (one that many water professionals will recognize): “That, then, is the real / conundrum; to show beauty / or the end of nature?”

It speaks to our desire to witness and render water phenomena faithfully, without accelerating their reductions to ‘ends’ (frozen instrumentally, politically, or otherwise). Just as importantly, it cautions against declaring some hydrological state, flux, or policy permanent, which is its own kind of ending. Even presenting a natural scene, phenomenon, or human-water interaction (in photographs, publications, or legal frameworks) can imply that it ought to remain unchanged, that it should always look thus; frozen. In doing so, don’t we, as water professionals, risk turning flux into fossil?

The images and verses together help mitigate this risk by offering glimpses of tathata (the “suchness” of place), a fleeting, visually-fractured encounter, weighted with consequence. Composed with the restraint and attentiveness found in Zen traditions, these works function as ecological koans: short, imagistic pairings that do not resolve. They interrupt abstraction (momentarily and deliberately) creating perceptual hinges that invite the reader to encounter water-in-place, rather than interpret it from a distance. In this way, Beven’s work resists the expectation of explanation and becomes a reflective instrument for thinking with water.

The River as Haiku complements technical hydrology by offering an aesthetically informed alternative mode of attention, one that resonates with recent calls for more place-based and epistemically diverse approaches to water knowledge (e.g., Koppes, 2022; Rachunok and Fletcher, 2023; Van Stan and Simmons, 2025). With mounting planning, policy, and prediction pressures, even the most technical water professional would benefit by making space for this kind of attention. One can pick up The River as Haiku and say, without irony, “I’m reading a prominent hydrologist’s text.” Ultimately, I think this is what the book offers: open to a page, let the photograph and paired haiku dislodge the usual mental framing. Let it replace urgency with curiosity. This small act of attention could be, and arguably should be, part of our broader work. One moment in particular captures this nuance: “Pretentious poets / feeding a myth to reveal / the essence of place.”

Paired with a triptych’d photo of the River Eden at Shoregill (Cumbria, England), the verse turns gently inward. The haiku questions its own posture. What myths do we impose on waters? What does it mean to reveal their “essence” and what are we really reaching for when we do?

That self-awareness is part of what makes this work valuable. It brings empirical sensibility to artistic practice, and vice versa. Thus, I find The River as Haiku is a continuation of Beven’s hydrological legacy by other means. It shows how attentiveness, restraint, and humility (qualities long essential to fieldwork and modelling) can inform our aesthetic and philosophical engagements with river landscapes. And it does this without asking for extra time. It’s a book to keep nearby and open during a lull in the data analysis, between meetings, or while waiting for a model output. A reminder that water is more than a study subject: it’s a source of meaning, always in motion, and never quite within grasp. Or, as Heraclitus might have written in haiku:

Each step in the stream / meets new waters, new river, / new self, flowing on.

References

Beven, K. 2019a. Creation by Passing Ducks and The Representation of Reality: Images as Experiences rather than Equivalences. On Landscape.

Beven, K. 2019b. Reflecting on Minimalism: Less is More. On Landscape.

Beven, K. 2021. The pleasure of the search for the unexpected. On Landscape.

Koppes, M.N. 2022. Braiding knowledges of braided rivers – the need for place-based perspectives and lived experience in the science of landscapes. Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 7, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1002/esp.5380.

Rachunok, B. and Fletcher, S. 2023. Socio-hydrological drought impacts on urban water affordability. Nature Water 1(1), https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-022-00009-w.

Van Stan II, J.T. and Simmons, J. 2024. Adopting a More Fluid “Frame of Mind” in Hydrology. In Hydrology and Its Discontents, pp. 35–44. Cham: Springer International Publishing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49768-1_5.

Van Stan, J.T. and Simmons, J. 2025. Water Models as Geographical Chimera: Precipitation Interception Routines as an Example of “Patchwork Empiricism.” Water Alternatives 18(2): 200–220.