Book of the Week – In the Wake of Silence: 208 Haiku by Klaus-Dieter Wirth

Klaus-Dieter Wirth has been writing haiku for more than 40 years. His book is unique in being documentary, chronological, and quadrilingual (German, English, French, Spanish); all texts are his own translations, the originals not always in his mother tongue. All 208 haiku have found international recognition in separate publications. Be sure to check out his Poet Profile in the Haiku Registry.

In the Introduction, he writes – “Haiku almost perfectly meets the spirit of our age where everything is geared to brevity, quickness, and global interchange,another explanation for its increasing popularity, its triumphant advance never achieved to such an extent by any other literary genre.Haiku is life – life is haiku!

Old man politely
thanks the door that has opened
all by itself.

Picnic. Looking for
a patch without flowers
to put down the teapot

at her father’s grave
he will be the first to know
that she is pregnant

scarecrow
signpost to nowhere
in a snowy field

You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library and please share your favorite poem from the book with us.

Do you have a chapbook published in 2018 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 THF Digital Librarian Dan Campbell and are used with permission.