Book of the Week – Step on the Rain by Raymond Roseliep

From Haikupedia:
Raymond Roseliep (born Raymond Francis Roseliep, August 11, 1917, Farley, Iowa, U.S.A.; died December 6, 1983, Dubuque, Iowa, U.S.A.), American Roman Catholic priest, professor of English at Loras College, and a resident chaplain at an infirmary for Franciscan nuns in Dubuque, as well as a critic, poet, and haiku poet. Roseliep promoted what he called “American haiku,” which diverged from the models of the early translators of Japanese haiku such as R. H. Blyth, and sought to define the haiku being written in English in the 1960s and 1970s. He was also interested in bridging the gap between haiku and mainstream poetry, as in his influential article “This Haiku of Ours,” and he maintained correspondence with many prominent authors and poets in the U.S.A. and Japan. Roseliep published 20 books of haiku and longer poetry, and he enjoyed placing his haiku in periodicals outside the usual haiku orbit, such as Poetry, the Thoreau Journal Quarterly, The Nation, Esquire, and Yankee Magazine. A full-length literary biography of “Father Ray” was published in 2015, an indexed edition in 2024, and his collected haiku in 2018. He lived in Dubuque, Iowa.

Step on the Rain was published in 1977.

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Below are a few selected poems from the book: