Book of the Week: Undercurrents by Irish Poet Amanda Bell

An article in Haikupepia writes that Amanda Bell is an Irish poet, author, editor, and mentor. She holds an MA in poetry studies and is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre. Her book, Undercurrents, was awarded 2nd Place in the Haiku Society of America’s Kanterman Merit Book Awards and shortlisted for a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award from The Haiku Foundation.

In the Preface to Undercurrents, Amanda writes “These river haibun combine stories of Irish rivers with fragments of personal recollection – the embedded haiku crystallizing moments remembered, droplets retrieved from the relentless advance of time and moving water. Woven between the haibun are haiku sequences, variations on a theme, responses to some aspect of the preceding text.”

In the Introduction, James Norton writes “we may be thankful to Amanda Bell for telling the stories of rivers, and for reminding us, through the many layers of her narrative, that rivers convey a deep and abiding metaphoric resonance, as the waters of life and death, the flow of time from origin to end.”

August meteors –
bumblebees repair their nest
after the badger

silver water
ribboning the gutters
low-slung moon

winter morning –
low sun on Sandymount
casts cockle shadows

the soft earth
darkened by summer rain –
white cosmos

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 2016 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.