Book-of-the-Week

Book of the Week: dead reckoning

kacian_deadreckoning

Jim Kacian has celebrated Haiku North America by creating a series of personal, themed, and illustrated chapbooks on a variety of topics, beginning in 2005 with this nautical offering (Red Moon Press).

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

All haiku in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by Tom Clausen, and are used with permission.




driftwood the slight curve of the horizon


paddling through the gravity of another world spring tide



bubbles up through green water the heat


without islands in the dead center loneliness



a night ship adrift in any darkness


long view to Sirius even the past isn't past



in a tent in the rain i become a climate


whiskey i sip it till it loves me



skull held up to the ear the sound of the sea


the wait for an owl the second time



deep in space the red shift of my mind


dead reckoning the moment the tide reverses

This Post Has 5 Comments

  1. This is incredible! The poem about driftwood, I know this…
    I was out at sea on a Destroyer as a reservist, no land insight. The ship stopped dead in the water and there it was a tree with leaves on the branches waving back and forth as if in a gentle storm…

  2. A wonderful book by Jim Kacian.

    I like reading the selections by Tom Clausen from the books, and then seeing other aspects of their design in the THF Digital Library. The images in this book by the author are also beautiful, along with the cover by Cynde Clark.

  4. If Hemingway wrote haiku it would sound like this…clean language with beautiful control.
    -Patrick

  5. Thank you for sharing Jim’s book with us. It made wonderful Monday night reading 🙂

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