A BOOK OF HAIKUS VOLUME I

PREFACE The haiku is originally from Japan and started life as the opening section of a longer poem called a renga. They seem to have evolved over time to become a short stand-alone poem of three lines. Haikus themselves can vary in their amount of syllables but the haikus I have written largely follow the traditional form known as teikei with a syllabic format of 5-7-5 syllables. From the nineteenth century and under the guiding influence of the Japanese poet, Ogiwara Seisensui the syllabic format was freed up and the seventeen syllables were not required quite so much. The Haiku Society of America noted a trend to using 12 or 15 syllables in the second half of the twentieth century among poets writing in English. The shorter form is known as a jiyuritsu but will not be evident in my poems. The haiku tends to avoid the subjective inner world of feelings and the focus is usually much more on the objective, external world where things and objects rather than feelings are described. My poems aim to follow that principle and focus on nature, wildlife, landscapes and places known to me and of interest. Sometimes the haikus cover more social topics also. I have written two volumes of haikus and this first volume includes haikus written between April 1993 and December 2005. The second volume contains haikus written between January 2006 and October 2021.