IT BREAKS YOUR HEART
Haiku and Senryu on the 2023 New York Mets
by James Knippen and Daniel Shank Cruz
This tender, funny, smart collection about baseball is also a collection of love poems that, yes, can break your heart. In their haiku and senryu, James Knippen and Daniel Shank Cruz direct our attentions—in the embodied images of their chosen forms—to the very specific excitements and disappointments that comprise love. I attended these poems as a devoted fan might, showing up to discover and rediscover how a complex love might look, taste, and feel even as “the field / haunted by ghosts” inevitably brought me to “the season’s slow end.”
—David Wright, author of The Small Books of Bach and Local Talent.
BETWEEN FALLING LEAVES AND THEIR SHADOWS
Anthology of poetry by James Knippen,
Sierra Shellabarger, Anirudh Vyas and Jamie Wimberly
The word “anthology” comes to us from Greek roots meaning “flower gathering.” Jamie Wimberly, through the “40 Under 40” program he helped launch with the Haiku Society of America, has been working with a group of relative newcomers to the haiku community. The results, as displayed in this collection, are inspiring. These flowerings and first fruits give us reason to anticipate great things for the collective future of English-language haiku.
John Stevenson, Managing Editor, The Heron’s Nest
A delightful collection of haiku from an emerging group of young poets. The degree of talent, sensitivity, and insight displayed by these students is impressive and is a testimony to the effectiveness of their instructor. A great read and highly recommended.
Jay Friedenberg, President, Haiku Society of America
WAISTDEEP IN MOONLIGHT
Collection of Haiku Poetry by Dave Fairhurst
A splendid collection...with such a light touch you are always surprised. – Colin Blundell, President British Haiku Society
… reminiscent of such masters as Basho and Ryokan, and … Kerouac…a collection worthy of repeatedly immersing oneself in. – Andrew Taylor, Lecturer of English,
Nottingham Trent University, Poet
David Fairhurst’s haiku trace patterns of motion. Nature ranges from being playfully out of reach to a source of sickness. – Professor Tim Youngs, Nottingham Trent University
… simple moments of everyday life, imbued with a touch of humour and sense of wonder. – Clive Bennett, poet
… playful and insightful, timely and timeless. Sometimes they make us smile, sometimes gasp. Sometimes they cut too deeply for us to do either. – Chris Parker, author
… a distillation of essences: his poems are poignant, pregnant and witty. – Gregory Woods
BEFORE I FORGET THEM
Collection of Haiku Poetry by Jamie Wimberly
English-Language haiku poets are most likely, at times, to take either Bashō or Issa as a model For Jamie Wimberly, however, the more apt comparison must be Buson. Readers are likely to read and interpret the poems of both poets in the context of their visual artistry. It is truly to be said of Jamie Wimberly that his painting vivifies his poems and it is clear that both partake of a shared palette. The emphasis on read, black and white is a statement but not one that lends itself to a manifesto. The open quality of his poems and paintings declines to submit to any sense of flatness of pat finality.
The comparison the Buson has its limitations because this book is so much a product of an American and a twenty-first century sensibility. We pull things loose from the great past and wider world. We present them in conceptual frames that would not have been possible in their origins. This is true of our modern adaptations of haiku and in contemporary representational painting. Both are in motion within this work. And the work is unsettling. This feels right and true.
It feels like life.
John Stevenson
Managing Editor, The Heron's Nest