Seasons In Haiku

With Seasons in Haiku, Takara beckons us once again to follow her down a pathway of purposeful communication cleared by poetic power. Only this time, she widens her focus beyond human interconnectivity to include human kinship with the four seasons of the natural world. For this 10th publication, she presents, for the first time, her selected haiku. Haiku is the traditional Japanese poem of three lines and seventeen syllables, that, despite its brevity, offers bursts of imagery that are mesmerizing in their simplicity and largely based on the poet's first-hand experiences of nature, anchored in observations of the seasons. In this collection, Takara's haiku are separated into four sections that correspond with the four seasons: Spring becomes SONG; Summer becomes SHIMMER; Autumn becomes SHADOWS; and Winter becomes SOJOURN. Her haiku crisscrosses seamlessly between the visible and invisible layers of unfathomable phenomena that define each of these seasons. She deftly conveys these phases of nature as fleeting moments that elude the human yearning for permanence. With images that are pure distillations of sensorial experiences, she serves notice that the only sure thing about these seasonal moments is that they are transient and subject to change.