Book of the Week – Cricket Song by Ludmila Balabanova

Cricket Song by Ludmila Balabanova is a slender collection that carries more than one music within it. Originally written in English and presented alongside Irish versions by Gabriel Rosenstock and Scots versions by John McDonald, the book becomes not simply a gathering of haiku but an exploration of how image travels across language and sound.

Balabanova, a Bulgarian poet long associated with international haiku circles, writes with clarity and restraint. Her poems seek revelation without complexity. They arrive through image, often allowing emotion to remain partially unstated.

The title poem opens the collection with delicacy:

cricket song
a drop of autumn rain
in the cobweb (p.1)

The cricket itself is absent. We hear it through the atmosphere. The drop of rain caught in the web feels suspended between music and silence, season and disappearance.

A few pages later comes a poem shaped by inheritance:

childhood –
my father teaching me
the constellations (p.3)

What moves here is not nostalgia alone but transmission. The stars are distant, yet the act of naming them creates intimacy. The poem honours learning as an act of care.

Balabanova often places large emotional currents inside modest scenes:

poppies
the earth remembers
its heart of fire (p.4)

The poppies become more than flowers. Fire enters as memory, perhaps of war, perhaps of buried vitality. The poem remains open enough to hold both readings.

Elsewhere, contemporary life enters without strain:

sounds of war
my son playing
a computer game (p.5)

This poem unsettles precisely because it offers no commentary. Real and simulated conflict echo one another. The reader supplies the discomfort.

One of the most memorable poems appears near the close:

hospice…
do sunset shadows get
beyond twilight (p.15)

The question is devastating in its gentleness. Sunset, shadow, twilight, hospice. None of these images explains mortality, yet together they create a space where grief and wonder coexist.

What gives Cricket Song its distinctiveness is the multilingual experience itself. Reading the Irish and Scots versions beside the English reminds us that haiku is not merely transferable language. Tone shifts. Texture alters. Sound becomes meaning.

As you read, pause for a moment over the three versions of a single poem. Which one reaches you first through sound rather than sense? And does the emotional centre of the poem remain the same, or does language quietly move it elsewhere?

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You can read the entire collection in the THF Digital Library.

And a small reminder for our readers. The THF Digital Library can now be found more easily through the carousel on the home page, making browsing and discovering collections a little simpler.

Do you have a full or chapbook length book published in 2021 or earlier that 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 the THF Digital Librarian Vidya Premkumar and are used with permission.