Book of the Week: Haiku Harvest 2000–2006 edited by Denis M. Garrison

Turn the pages of Haiku Harvest 2000–2006 and a remarkable map begins to emerge. The places change, the seasons change, and so do the poets, but the impulse remains recognisable. A heron dries its feathers, a flower becomes a joke, a red mitten lies among footprints, a bomb site enters a haiku. This is a record of haiku as it was being written, tested and expanded across an international community.

Edited by Denis M. Garrison and published in 2007, this substantial volume brings together eleven issues of Haiku Harvest, two issues of Haiku Noir and one of Ku Nouveau. The journal describes its purpose as supporting both classical haiku and related forms while encouraging serious experimentation within English poetry.

One of the pleasures of the collection is the sheer variety of ways poets approach observation. J. D. Heskin gives us a moment of movement that is almost cinematic:

beyond: the river,
a blue heron leaves
to dry its feathers

J. D. Heskin, p. 26

The river establishes distance, but the heron immediately draws our attention closer. There is no attempt to make the bird symbolic. It is simply doing what a bird does, and the poem finds enough in that action.

Kenneth Pobo takes a more playful route:

Fritilaria,
your orange hair has the moon
looking for clippers!

Kenneth Pobo, p. 27

The flower becomes almost mischievous. Pobo’s humour is a useful reminder that haiku can accommodate wit and personality without abandoning close observation.

The collection also makes room for poems where the smallest image carries considerable emotional weight. Denis M. Garrison writes:

peach petal on snow
my Jane would have been
ten today

Denis M. Garrison, p. 14

The first line creates a delicate visual contrast, but the final line changes everything. A seasonal image becomes an intensely personal measure of time and loss. Nothing is explained. The reader is trusted to feel the distance between the petal and the absent child.

Joy Hewitt Mann brings spirituality into the physical world:

with flower water
washing his granite stupa
texture of the stone

Joy Hewitt Mann, p. 10

The poem is rooted in ritual, yet ends with touch. The stone’s texture gives the spiritual image a physical presence.

And the journal does not shy away from contemporary catastrophe. Rakesh Biswas writes:

After the disaster:
from the piled-up bodies
disharmony of cell phones

Rakesh Biswas, p. 107

The juxtaposition is disturbing because the cell phone is so naturally part of contemporary life. The poem shows how haiku can respond to history without becoming a miniature news report.

Reading Haiku Harvest today is therefore an opportunity to see a tradition in motion. Nature, grief, humour, spirituality and political reality all find their place. The journal’s openness to innovation makes the volume especially valuable for writers interested in where haiku can go next.

Try opening the collection at random and choosing one poem without looking at the author’s name. What does the poem tell you about its writer’s world before you know anything about them?

You can read the entire compilation in the THF Digital Library. The THF Digital Library can now be easily found via the carousel on the home page, making it easier to explore the Foundation’s growing archive of books and journals.

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. Book of the Week selections are made by THF Digital Librarian Vidya Premkumar and are featured with permission.