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I am happy to cite a few that delighted me. On page 46, John Wills's "a box of nails" took my breath away. To find the...I'm not sure how else to say it...human essence of a box of nails: hard, cold, isolated--to make one feel empathy for a box of nails...just brilliant. I feel the coldness of that shed. And the alliteration--"shelf in the shed"--one has to grit one's teeth to say it. The poem makes one shiver.

Peter Newton's "now here." And Melissa Allen--her work is always a delight, always something new.

Those are only a few of the ones I return to again and again after reading the book through.

I'll keep secret the ones that make me angry, knowing I need to understand more before speaking of these out loud. But as I said in my longer post, I learned something even from these.

   I use anthologies of literature in several courses I teach, and I know there's no perfect anthology. Or perhaps, the perfect anthology is the one that makes the reader think, "If I could edit an anthology, I'd add this, and this, and this...." By that criterion, HIE is a perfect anthology. I know it made me think, not only about what I'd include or not include if I had been asked to edit such a work (I'd have run for the hills, is what I'd have done, if asked to edit such a work), but also the "why" behind each work that was included. I kept in mind the stated purpose of this anthology: to highlight haiku that have contributed to the evolution of the form in English. Some of the poems in this volume delighted me. Some actually made me angry, and taught me almost as much as the ones that delighted me. From almost every haiku in these pages, I learned something. I annotated, even—talk about an English teacher gone wild! Above all, HIE shows how vibrant and necessary this form is. I can't imagine a life without haiku, and now I can't imagine a haiku life without this book as reference, guide, companion.