Book-of-the-Week

Book of the Week: Sixteen Haiku

kusamacoverTokihiko Kusama produced this chapbook (Nagata, 1992) at the beginnings of Japanese interest in exchanging haiku ideas with poets from other cultures. It was fashionable in those days to offer such a volume, and this one, modestly selecting a mere handful of poems from a lifetime’s involvement with the genre, and in translation by the esteemed Jack Stamm, is a particularly elegant example.

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

Do you have a chapbook published 2009 or earlier 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 Jim Kacian, following a concept first explored by Tom Clausen, and are used with permission.




Winter roses . . .
     the office poet picks up
          his paltry bonus


Boats clear the harbor
     evening sun penetrates
          my spring overcoat



Athletic meet
     embarrasssment surrounds
          a nursing mother


Just too tired
     for courtship and all that —
          twilight cicadas



Leaving the sky
     open for wild geese
          dusk falls on a bridge


Winter night
     I scatter extra parsley
          over my soup

This Post Has 4 Comments

  3. This is a great resource for Haiku. Currently working on a multicultural chapbook featuring haiku in various Nigerian languages.

    Will be great to have it published here.

    1. Sounds very interesting, Jerry. If you will send us a copy when it’s published, and a PDF file of it also, if you can (saves scanning), we’ll make sure it gets into our Haiku Foundation Online Book Collection for all to read at any time you approve.

      Garry Eaton
      Digital Librarian

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