Book of the Week: Haiku Dreaming Australia
Our Book of the Week is the final version of John Bird’s Haiku Dreaming Australia, his attempt at a collection of distinctively Australian haiku, begun in 2006 and suspended in 2011. It also contains the archive of all the poems accepted for publication and then replaced by others during that five year period. Worried by the trend toward a homogeneous, global haiku, Bird hoped to foster a greater feeling among Australian haiku poets of the importance of preserving a sense of their distinctive environment and culture in their haiku. The collection also contains several essays by Bird on various related haiku subjects.
red dawn –
the aborigine casts
a long shadow-Ken Daley
cave wall the outline of an empty hand
-Jan Iwaszkiewicz
last rites –
incense dilutes the reek
of irish whiskey-Lorin Ford
You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library.
Do you have a chapbook published 2010 or earlier you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details.
Haiku featured in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by THF Digital Librarian Garry Eaton, and are used with permission
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How lovely it is to see John Bird’s Haiku Dreaming Australia collection, along with his frank and witty essays, archived at The Haiku Foundation. No-one has been more deeply and genuinely engaged with the various issues arising from Australian haiku or more active in reaching out to and encouraging as many Australian haiku writers as he could find than John has been.
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Many thanks to The Haiku Foundation and especially to Garry Eaton for his hard work in converting the original web pages into a readable resource.
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– Lorin
Thanks to THF for promoting this wonderful collection of Australian haiku. I hope it will be as inspiring for other poets who write with a sense of place as it has been for me since I first came across it. In fact I think it was probably Lorin Ford who put me onto John Bird’s collection. Cheers, Lorin.