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Book of the Week: Sanguinella: Haiku by British Poet Helen Buckingham

Helen Buckingham lives in Wells, England and her haiku have been featured in many journals. Her note – “Fifty-eight years since the seed was planted, Sanguinella provides a scrump back through the often bloody orchard that constitutes my life until now, from the rural pickings gathered over recent years in the bonsai city of Wells, to the tangled branches of a childhood spent battling various forms of blight in a mulberry-stained corner of South London.” Additional books by Helen in the THF library include Armadillo Basket and Water On the Moon.

crows skype as the bull flies

complete
as we are
waning moon

Midnight Mass
we settle in
for the duration

another day
unbathed
this internet affair

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.

Sanguinella

This Post Has 6 Comments

  1. Thanks so much for the feature, Dan, and to everyone who’s commented, mightily appreciated.

  3. Buckingham san has an original mind. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read this wonderful book.

  4. Hey, Dan, these are really good!! Thank you, and Helen.

    Okay, one or two maybe don’t work for me, but the other 200 do. Full marks to the poet for taking haiku out of the fuzzy sentimental dreamland of lyrical tropes into THIS world. And without the wilful obscurantism of some contemporary haikuists. All highly intelligible, and highly intelligent. I love it.

    I keep a little file of fine verses handy, to help winning commentators in re:Virals to find a good one if they haven’t time to comb the journals during the day available for the turnaround. I’ve just added no less than seventeen of these to the one of Helen’s I had already clocked. Easily a record for a single publication.

    A deep bow. I would like to write like this.

  5. One of my favourite haiku poets and this is why:

    two minute silence
    the black centre
    of the poppy

    Consistently Brilliant!

  6. Enjoy the book!

    Back cover:
    “In the very small hours our greatest need is one we often meet head on just by ourselves. In this haiku collection you will see the author measure up, in her trials, tribulations, and also triumphs. If you want an incantation to invoke, that measures up against the ills of the world visited upon you, this is the book: When the blue hour makes or breaks the witching hour and you find you made it through.”
    —Alan Summers, founder, Call of the Page

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