Book of the Week: Through the Café Door: 40 Haiku by Caroline Gourlay

The author bio in Through the Café Door states that “Caroline Gourlay was born in London in l939, yet for most of her life has lived on the Welsh Border where she and her farmer husband brought up their three sons. In her time she has studied and taught the piano, earned her living as a social worker, worked as a calligrapher, and written poetry with sometimes more, sometimes less, success.”

She was the editor of Blithe Spirit, the journal of the British Haiku Society from 1998–2000 and two of her interesting articles about haiku are Some Thoughts on the Writing of Haiku and Longer Poems and Haiku and Haiku Societies — the Future? Other books by Caroline in the Digital Library include Crossing the Field and Lull Before Dark.

free afternoon ‒
taste
of a shared apple

summer breeze
a grey wave rolling across
the wheatfield

long afternoon ‒
thinking of the yellow bird
trapped in the church

the last guest leaves
a rose
opens in the vase

You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library and share your favorite poem from th

Do you have a chapbook published in 2015 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.