TABLE OF CONTENTS

XIX:3 October, 2004

Isthmus by Tony Beyer. Puriri Press: New Zealand. 2004. Card cover, sewn, 5" x 8", 24 pp., $NZ15.00 (within New Zealand) or $US10.00 (outside). ISBN 0-908843-29-6. Order from Puriri Press, 37 Margot Street, Epsom, Auckland 3, New Zealand.

The Smell of Rust: Haiku by Margaret Chula. Katsura Press: 2003. Perfect Bound, 5.5 x 8.5, 100 pps., full color cover, ISBN 0-9638551-2-3, $14.95. Order from Katsura Press, P.O. Box 275, Lake Oswego, OR 97034.

The First Hundred Years by Ruth Holzer. New Women’s Voices Series, No. 29 published by Finishing Line Press, P.O. Box 1626, Georgetown, Kentucky, 40324. Saddle-stapled, 5.5 x 8.5 inches, 30 pps., ISBN: 1-932755-44-6.

Vital Forces by Yuko Kawano translated into English by Amelia Fielden and Aya Yuhki. BookPark:2004. Perfect bound with a full-color cover, 5.5 x 8.5, 180 pps., kanji and English with a foreword by Kawano. Order from Amelia Fielden. 

Cold Stars White Moon by Larry Kimmel. Winfred Press, 364 Wilson Hill Road, Colrain, MA 01340. Spiral bound, 8.5 x 5.5, 44 pp., $8.00 postpaid USA; $12.00 overseas, ISBN:  0-9743856-7-0.

Sanctuary by Giselle Maya. Published by Koyama Press, 84750 Saint Martin de Castillon, France. Hand-tied with handmade cover papers, 7.5 x 9.5 inches, 52 pps., $20.00.

Destination by Aya Kuhki. stand@rt Publishing House, str. V. Babes, 3 B, et.2, ap. 14, 6600- LASI, Romania. Perfect bound, 128 pages, with a black and white photo section. Poems are in English and French by Dorin Popa.

Tulip Haiku: An Anthology by Angela Leuck. Shoreline Press: Quebec, Canada, 2004. Perfect bound with a full color cover, 5.5" x 6", 106 pp., Introduction by Christopher Herold, ISBN: 1-896754-34-1, $12.95 in Canada; $10.95 US. Order from Shoreline, 23 Ste-Anne-d-Belleview, Quebec, Canada H9X 1L1  

Boven de wolken (Above the Clouds) Derde haikoe-boek by Bart Mesotten. Uitgeverij Pelckmans: Flanders, 2003.Hardcover, 544 pp., Indexed, ISBN:90 289 3357 3. Contact Uitgeverij Pelckmans, Kapelsestraat 222, 2950 Kapellen, Belgium or Bart Mesotten, Drogenberg 100, 3090 Overijse, Belgium.

BOOK REVIEWS
Jane Reichhold

Breaking news
Just as this issue of Lynx was put up on the web we got something in the mail that you have to hear about now, so we are tucking this extra in with the hopes that you will help spread the news.

This year Winfred Press (Larry Kimmel) and Clinging Vine Press (Linda Jeannette Ward held a tanka contest. They got 154 entries from five countries. The first cut was judged by Sanford Goldstein and then Laura Maffei and Larry Kimmel co-judged the final 18 winners. Twelve of the winners’ poems were accompanied by a large drawing by Merrill Ann Gonzales to comprise monthly pages in a large 11" x 17" calendar. The six commended tanka are included on the last page. Winners were: Art Stein (1^st Place), Marjorie Buettner (2^nd Place), Pamela A. Babusci (3^rd Place), Margaret Chula, kirsty karkow, Pamela Miller Ness, , sheila windsor, Susan Antolin, and Tom Clausen.

This is a big calendar with space for appointments and you get a tanka a month with a black and white (or actually lovely soft cream color) drawing related to the season by Merrill Ann Gonzales. Order now. And as a bonus, on the back pages are the guidelines for entering this contest next year. If you missed out this year, do make sure you are there in the future! There are prizes of $80, $40, and $20 to be won as well as getting your winner in a calendar. Great idea!

2005 Tanka Calendar by Winfred Press, Larry Kimmel, and Clinging Vine Press, Linda Jeannette Ward. Spiral-bound (so it opens flat), 11" x 17", filled with ink drawings by Merrill Ann Gonzales, winning tanka and all the days of your life next year. To order the 2005 TANKA CALENDAR, please send $12 for USA and Canada postpaid, or $15 postpaid for overseas.  Checks drawn on US banks only, and mailed to either:  Larry Kimmel, 364 Wilson Hill Road, Colrain, MA 01340," or Linda Jeannette Ward, PO Box 231, Coinjock, NC 27923.

On the cover of Isthmus, the title floats on a sea of pearlized blue paper announcing that Tony Beyer is sensitive to the importance and meaning in everything concerning the five tanka sequences that make up this book. The titles are: "The Chemical Factory," "Abattoir," "Volcano Part," "The Foreshore," "Timber Yard," and "Historic House." From these you can see that Beyer writes about that which he knows and is familiar to him.

The poems are set perfectly and because Beyer writes tanka with fairly short lines, he can easily place four on a page without crowding. He has a good feeling for words and images as well as being spiritually advanced enough to write in "Historic House":

everything outside
the window
has changed
except the sky
changing all the time

Beyer is able to write stunning individual tanka with the same skill as he puts together a sequence. Each poem is like a clear-eyed visit to a place in Beyer’s environment that reveals what is there and what is there that often is not revealed.

Somehow, it always seems to be an occasion when Margaret Chula publishes a new book of her poetry. Perhaps it is the fact that Katsura Press has set a standard of excellence in book making that is so professional, so mainstream one feels that our too-often genres are finally getting the notice they deserve. And the quality only begins at this point. As one opens the soft cream pages, the beautifully set haiku slide easily off the pages into the reader’s mind. There is just the right amount of haiku per page, three or less, so each poem radiates and vibrates clearly and individually.

Chula’s haiku exhibit all the great qualities we have come to know and expect from her tanka, and yet she is such an expert that there is never a question of whether a poem should be a tanka or haiku. She is secure in her style built from years of studying both forms in English and in Japanese. As you can see, her poems are presented without initial caps and with a minimum of punctuation. This allows the reader to find the several ways the different haiku can be read.

spring breeze
scented with wisteria
my just-washed hair

Among the many haiku is a gem that begins on page 89 – "Searching for Emily." This is a poem sequence written upon the adventure of seeking the grave of Emily Dickinson. What adds to the interest of this work is the fact that Chula has chosen to compose the opening to the poem with alternating tanka and haiku. Just as the reader becomes familiar with the patterning, Chula then stays with the haiku form for the rest of the poem. I found the device very interesting and one that has been too-little employed by poets adept in both forms. Some may have wished she had continued alternating regularly with the tanka, but I understood why she chose this format – that is the way reality goes. Tanka are harder to write and when one is writing on the fly, haiku come more quickly and easily. It seemed to me, that in the beginning of the poem when she was fresh she was able to use tanka to record her impressions, but as the impressions upon her senses began to multiply, there was only time to use haiku. For the reader also, this patterning works to speed up the poem and to push the author into the background while letting the scene of the graveyard come forward. Even if you are not a fan of Emily Dickinson, this is the poem to read for what Chula does with haiku and tanka. If you are a Dickinson fan, you will certainly want a copy of this poem as well as the rest of the book.

Margaret Chula lived and taught for twelve years in Kyoto, Japan where she also obtained a teacher’s license in Sogetsu School of Ikebana. The Smell of Rust is the fifth book of her work. She is active in giving lectures, workshops, and performances in the international haiku community while living in Portland, Oregon.

The First Hundred Years by Ruth Holzer. New Women’s Voices Series, No. 29 published by Finishing Line Press, P.O. Box 1626, Georgetown, Kentucky, 40324. Saddle-stapled, 5.5 x 8.5 inches, 30 pps., ISBN: 1-932755-44-6.

Ruth Holzer, and her poetry, is familiar to readers of Lynx, but what they may not know is she is also an accomplished writer in various other poetry genres. The First Hundred Years is a showcase of her ease in moving between different forms, following the needs of her voice and message. She rhymes, she writes in free verse; even includes an excellent ghazal:

The dumplings you may eat in a dream
are warm and tasty; but still a dream.

Annihilation angel, his embrace forever
devoted to dust, arose in a dream

For a castle, it’s not so bad a castle
where they almost died of love – it was a dream.

The real postman races across town to deliver
another of your letters – bahalom –in a dream.

Press to your face, Ruth, that yellow sweater,
his chaos ray of sun, and wake from your dream.

The message is heavily influenced by experiences of her living in Europe while remembering the Holocaust and her attempts to come to terms by those times and events. There are a lot of very grim images in the work and much of farewell and adieu, yet one has to give Holzer credit for stating so bluntly what she feels and how she sees the world. The First Hundred Years presents a much darker view than most of her work in Lynx.

Ruth Holzer grew up in New Jersey and worked in California on minority education and other community programs, as well as in magazine and textbook publication. She has also lived in London where she worked in the press office of the American Embassy. She now lives in Virginia where this year she won the Edgar Allen Poe Memorial Award sponsored by the Poetry Society of Virginia.

Vital Forces by Yuko Kawano translated into English by Amelia Fielden and Aya Yuhki. BookPark:2004. Perfect bound with a full-color cover, 5.5 x 8.5, 180 pps., kanji and English with a foreword by Kawano. Order from Amelia Fielden. 

Vital Forces was first published in 1997, by another of Japan’s foremost female tanka writers – Yuko Kawano. Now for the first time, thanks to the long years of work, Aya Yuhki and Amelia Fielden, bring the tanka of Yuko Kawano to the English readers. The tanka are presented, with three or four to the page, on the right side written in kanji, and on the left in the normal five lines of English. Wisely the poems are set without caps and with only the minimal of punctuation so they are easy to read and yet retain the feeling of the Japanese. The English is faultless and this is a real pleasure to find in a book of tanka translation. Educated enough in both English and translation, Amelia Fielden and Aya Yuhki are comfortable in bringing the Japanese poetry as poetry and not as English sentences. Thus even more the work in Vital Forces is worthy of being studied and emulated.

Vital Forces is Yuko Kawano’s seventh book of tanka, so the reader can be assured that Yuko Kawano, too, is an expert on writing tanka in Japanese. At this time of her life, in her forties, she is experiencing the future loss of her two children, a boy and a girl, as they prepare to leave her home. She seems to put herself through a great deal of anguish just thinking about their leaving. From reading between the lines in the poems, a reader can get the feeling that she much prefers thinking about her beautiful young son than her old, baggy-eyed husband. As with many parents of teen-age children, she tries to seduce her way into their lives with her mother love, but she is constantly repulsed, and thereby greatly wounded. Tanka seems her solace for this pain.

The many tanka of the book are broken up into sequences, each with a title. A few are only one-poem long, but most of them have 7 – 11 tanka per sequence. I liked the title "Paper-thin Soup," I also admired Yuko Kawano’s ability to pace the selection of her poems by using renga methods, to some degree. What I mean by this, is the fact that often the sequence started with a poem about some facet of nature and her relationship to it to set the scene. Then when she had runs of poems about her children, she would occasionally intersperse them with the nature-nature poem as relief to the constant lamenting.

I feel very impatient with these poets with only one focus for their poetry and maybe their lives? The book would have appealed to me more if Yuko Kawano had not bitched and complained so much and so publicly about her kids. Tanka are supposed to be about love, yes, but from reading these poems, I got the feeling of a very oppressive smother love. Every mother is guilty of this to some degree, and especially during the difficult years when the kids are teen-agers, and yet the attitude that "as mother I have a right to complain of how my kids treat me" and to make this as the sole focus of the book was just a bit too much for me.

The title for the book came from the poem:

I feel the strange presence
of my sleeping son –
he is using
his vital forces
as he sleeps

And she continues with:

if I can get the kid
to eat something
she warms up –
her words trickle
like raindrops

Larry Kimmel seems to have taken a selected section of his best tanka and arranged them into a book-long tanka sequence. It was good to find many of my favorites of his works reappearing in this new arrangement. I love his tanka when they are multi-faceted and as rich as:

Looking down
on that distant page
of meadow –

a railroad train straight as a sentence
and I too mountain high to read its noise

The "too many" words in the lower section, as compared to the upper part, add to the sense of the poem and one has to applaud his courage to do this. Most of Kimmel’s tanka follow the short, long, short, long, long patterning but when he strays, it is done with intent. Many of the poems follow the classic comparison between an observance of nature and his inner landscape such as in:

All morning
the mood of the otherwise
forgotten dream –
the backs of maple leaves
turned silver under water

Many of the poems seem to have a whiff of memory of a lost love with sweet remembrance of times long ago, and others deal with the everyday feelings of a poet who is completely aware during the smallest occurrence.

Some may wonder why the poem begins with a capital letter and yet has no period to "end the sentence," but it seems Kimmel has his reasons for wishing to continue this practice.

Sanctuary consists of collaborative poems Giselle Maya has written with three other women. Two were done with Mari Konno, three with June Moreau and four with Jane Reichhold. There is enough mixture of kasen renga, shorter renga, and linked tanka, and linked haiku to add interest and pacing to the book. The various voices, led throughout by Maya, offers an interesting study on the different ways these four persons write and handle the various genres.

Not only are the genres mixed, we have an international cross-section with Giselle Maya in France, Mari Konno in Japan and June Moreau and Jane Reichhold in America. Giselle, due to her many travels between all these countries is the perfect person to pull together the common element in the works. It is all too easy to overlook the importance of such international persons as Maya and the contribution that can only be made by such an individual. Not only does Maya, do the publishing, she has also been poet enough to write well and much with this combination. Someday this has to be recognized.

Due to her love of tanka, or individuality, Maya often chooses to set the links of renga as if they are tan renga – two persons writing one tanka – so that the poem seems a linked tanka. This system may momentarily confuse persons used to seeing renga written in two- and three-line stanza, but it is entirely sensible and admirably shows the interconnectedness of the pairs of links. By using the now conventional method of putting the authors’ work in either roman or italics, the reader can concentrate on the fluidity of the poem without the initials of ownership.

Due to Maya’s penchant for using only nature-nature images, the book is heavily weighted in that direction. Only in her work with Jane Reichhold does one find the normal mixture of human affairs and nature verses as in renga.

The book is prefaced by Maya’s comments on the renga form and the experience of writing renga with other poets. Included are illustrations from Claude Monet, and a series of excellent collages by Maya titled, "Planets."

        To those of us who have translated collections of Japanese tanka poets, a golden chance may appear when we come across a tanka poet whose poems are so moving and profound that the work becomes a total labor of love. Such a moment must have come to Hatsue Kawamura and Jane Reichhold in presenting for the first time a considerable body of the work of Fumiko Nakajo. I have often quoted Takuboku's 1909 comment from an essay in which he says tanka is a diary of the emotional life of the poet. Fumiko's life was tanka, and her tanka are her life. When we consider that she died at the early age of 32 in 1954, that she began writing tanka in 1947 when she joined a tanka circle in her home town Obihiro in Hokkaido, that in 1954 she won a tanka competition for a 50-tanka sequence in a magazine whose publication won her instant fame, that her first collection was published in the same year in July, and that she died the very next month, her achievement is all the more startling.  It was none other than Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata (the award given in l968) who wrote the preface for that volume entitled The Loss of Breasts (Chibusa Soshitsu).  Fumiko had sent a letter to Kawabata asking him to write its preface, and moved by her letter and her poems, he complied.

        When I started reading the translators' Foreword to Breasts of Snow, I found it was a biographical presentation that suddenly ended with World War II over and with Fumiko's husband in trouble for engaging in some illegal practice connected to his railway-related job, the discovery made after the birth of the first of  their four children. I wondered if there had been some printing error that had eliminated the rest of the biography. But I soon realized the translators continued their biographical summary bit by bit in most of the translated poems as each appeared. Thus readers can easily see the connection between Fumiko's tanka and life.

        To cite one example where biographical data and analysis are essential in aiding readers, the poem on p. 22 may serve as a typical entry:

"Because of the quality of Fumiko Nakajo's tanka, and her ensuing fame, she became acquainted with another locally well-known tanka writer, Taku Omori. Through their shared passion for tanka, the couple began to have deep feelings for each other. Omori was already married[,] and his wife, who was also a member of the tanka club, was known and admired by Fumiko. Even this did not stop her from falling in love with him. This love, with an experienced married man[,] was very different from her previous encounters with men in that she had respect and admiration for him beyond the passion. Because Omori was in the last stages of tuberculosis, the relationship was even more romantic in being platonic.

"The expression of 'snow' of the last line is a metaphor of their more restrained, cooler love. Also the concept of snow falling obscures and isolates the couple from the eyes of the rest of the world."

        Readers will discover in reading the 143 poems in the collection that Fumiko's life was filled with extraordinary desire for love, with problems of violations of cultural codes, with vacillations in the wish to be a good mother, with complicated and overwhelming anxieties about her cancer and surgeries, with the paramount importance of nature in her life, and with her eventually confronting the approach of death and its meanings. The translators list eight divisions from Fumiko's works to form a startling sequence with a dramatic beginning, middle, and end and a profound conclusion in which the significance of life and death eventually coincide.

        Fumiko's poems are often startling in their passionate and visual revelations. In one poem she refers indirectly to her lover's sexual organ: 

"'sitting as if
embarrassed about legs too long,
aren't you?'
having such a casual chat
surely I am his elder" (p. 56).  

During her stay in a hospital when her cancer was spreading to lymph nodes in her neck and throat, she touches a male visitor's sleeve buttons on his jacket. Write the translators: "She may have made a connection between the three ornamental buttons on the jacket of Western suits and the buttons of the fly on men's pants" (p. 115). Her sexual references are even more veiled in her close observations of nature: 

"as if in joy
the oyster bound
by winter kelp
will raise up
a thorn of flesh"  (p. 105).

        When I taught creative writing at Purdue University, I often told my students that creativity is the art of making interesting or unusual connections. Fumiko's tanka amaze us by the creative connections she makes. One example will have to suffice: "overhead a sound/fireworks in the night sky/shoot up and open/everywhere I/can be taken." The translators comment: "This poem contains the only sexual scene in her tanka collection. The verb ubawarete – 'taken' – can mean a woman's body is 'taken' by a man's so that she is taken in passion or as 'possessed' as in almost crazy. In addition, the loss of her breast means that a part of her body has been taken away from her which adds greatly to [the] ephemeral aspect of fireworks. The fireworks symbolize her fleeting, transient and ephemeral happiness, since she now knows she is fated to die soon" (p. 70).

        In an essay at the end of the translations, entitled "Fumiko Nakajo as a Poet," Jane Reichhold lists three new writers of tanka over the past century that have made a real difference to the world. She cites Akiko Yosano, Machi Tawara, and Fumiko. "It is easy for male readers," Reichhold writes, "to 'fall in love' with the works of a 'sweet hot thing' but not a dying woman, scarred with the loss of both breasts with children weeping in the background" (p. 150).  I believe it is the appeal of Fumiko's tanka, translated at times in colloquial English, at times in formal patterns, to pierce us with their emotional and intellectual vigor. Tanka poets ought to read Fumiko, especially those who focus on nature in the human scene, for while I have often felt that nature-oriented tankaists seem to superimpose their images, Fumiko is often able to fully integrate the image with her emotional state. But let's not limit Fumiko's readers. It would be a good thing if the wider world  also read her to discover the multiple diversity of the tanka form.

It seems this collaboration of translation and publication was the result of a meeting at the World Congress of Poets meeting in Lasi, Romania, on October 28^th – November 1^st, 2002. From the several photos of this meeting in the back of the book, one can deduce that Aya Yuhki and Dorin Popa met and Popa offered to translate Yuhki’s poems into French and publish them in Romania. This interaction makes one realize how our world has shrunk and been enlarged by new constellations working together. Aya Yuhki, who often has poems in Lynx, writes in both Japanese and English. For this we all can be very thankful as she is among the very few persons able to bring her natural talents so completely to both languages. She has also been an important influence of the flow of English tanka into Japanese with her translations of the books by Father Neal H. Lawrence and Anna Holley. Please note that she was also a translator, with Amelia Fielden, of Yuko Kawano’s Vital Forces also reviewed in this issue.

In Destination, Aya presents her many tanka, four to a page, in 27 sequences consisting of one or two pages. Her range of experiences and ability to focus on the beauty and magic of many experiences, often while traveling – hence the title, gives a breadth to the book that keeps it fresh and new on each page. Even within a sequence she reaches out and mixes up collection of experiences while keeping to her subject so that the reader feels intrigued and invigorated by the combinations of images. An example is:

birds acquired
wings in their eagerness
to fly;
my heart is impressed
by the theory of evolution

sound of birdcalls
mindful of His will,
creatures
of God express themselves
in beautiful languages

snowy heron,
keep black bill
erect in the water,
solitary figure
casting a shadow

a fly in winter
buzzes against the window
in dazzling sunshine
the sounds
seem like hailstones

as I pass
by the pet shop,
a parakeet
with blue feathers
talks to me

The English appears on the left-hand page with the matching French version of the poem on the right. I tried to type in the French to show you, but somehow my Word program refused to behave. I can say however, that the French is word-for-word with the English, and even line-for-line – which makes this book an additional treat for someone wishing to brush up on their French skills.

In the very back of the book, Aya Yuhki has two poems which she calls, "Collaborations of Poem and Tanka," in which she, following the example of Ikuyo Yoshimura’s poem in Poetry Pulse, combines the forms of what she calls tyouka, but which we were taught to call chôka – the form written in 5 or 7 sound units to any length, but closing with a 7 – 7 pattern. However, in spite of this explanation, Aya Yuhki uses a free-verse pattern (which leaves us where?) with the addition of one or two tanka (or as she refers to them in this as Hanka) at the end. This kind of an explanation is typical of why discussing Japanese poetry can be so confusing for us foreigners.

Nevertheless, from what I can deduce from this strange mixture of description and the poems themselves, (without the Japanese romaji to be able to count the units) Yuhki is really attempting to make a symbiotic work from free verse and tanka. Both poems begin with strangely shaped four-liners (are these remnants of the sedoka?) and then the first one – "Destination" – launches into two sets of eight-liners, closed by another four-liner and the two tanka. The second one – "Your Massiveness" – follows a different patterning, but also ends with two tanka. Yuhki is to be complimented on this attempt, because I agree with her that this is the ultimate new way of absorbing genres of other cultures and other times. She is surely on the forefront of what is happening with poetry in Japan and therefore you should make an attempt to get this book.

Reeds opens with an introduction by Jeanne Emrich that establishes her as the current most knowledgeable expert on the subject of contemporary haiga – Japanese for the genre of poems written beside or with a graphic element. Then she immediately bows to Stephen Addiss, the expert on Japanese haiga, who centers his comments around the work, "Two Deer" by Nakajima Kahoo (1866 – 1925). To my delight, two of his classical haiga are the openers for the illustrations. This is an excellent way of showing haiga’s most recent past and the vast changes that have already occurred in the genre. Editor Emrich has arranged the book so it starts out gently with these "quiet" examples using sumi-ink brush work before exploding into the bold and colorful works that seem to be on the cutting edge of this genre.

The majority of the haiga are printed in full color, one to a page, so the reader can enjoy each image or the facing images. Most of the time Emrich arranged the  pages so both sides show the works are of one author, or else someone with very similar techniques in order to create a flow with minimal changes.

It cannot be easy to get between the covers of one book, such diverse artistic methods as Ion Codrescu and Gary LeBel. There is also an excellent interview of Gary LeBel that will only be more valuable when people look back at the beginnings of haiga outside of Japan.

Raffael de Gruttola has an article on his experiences matching his haiku with the very talented painted, Wilfred Croteau.

At the close of the book, one finds generous descriptions of the twenty-eight contributors. These come from Japan, Tasmania, Romania, Canada and the United States to prove that Reeds has the whole world represented.

One cannot avoid comparing the works in Reeds 1 and Reeds 2, so I would encourage readers to get both books to watch the evolution of this exciting part of the haiku world. How fortunate we are to have so many artists among the haiku writers and even more blessed to have the work and patronage of Jeanne Emrich.

What a joy it is to see a haiku book so beautifully and professionally made as Tulip Haiku! Angela Leuck, Associate Editor at Shoreline Press, has pulled out all the stops to make this book very special, from size, cover design and colors, to the placement of the individual haiku within the book.

The publication was coordinated with a launch in Montreal for an "Evening of Tulips" and then continued on to Toronto for its Tulip Festival, as a souvenir of Canada. Most of the poets were gleaned from Haiku Canada members as well as friends from the U.S., France, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, India and Japan. Angela Leuck is in her own right, an excellent haiku poet, so her choices were impeccable. The poems are presented in lower case with a minimum of punctuation one or two to a page. These are divided into fourteen sections to wisely pace the reader’s attention and give force and direction (always an issue in anthologies) to this collection. The preface by Leuck gives a bit of history of the tulip’s arrival to the Americas as well as a succinct history of haiku’s own trip here.

Even though the cover indicates this is a book of haiku, a few tanka are sprinkled in among its shorter cousins. Tulip Haiku contains the works of many familiar names as well as those less well-known.

no matter
what colours
I pick
a sadness . . .
tulips in the wind

Pamela A Babusci

The first 365 pages of Boven de wolken (Above the Clouds) Derde haikoe-boek are in Dutch but from there on the haiku and haiku sequences are translated into various languages – very often English. For anyone wishing to see the source of so much that was done for the Haikoe-centrum Vlaanderen, the national haiku organization for Flanders, here is the place to find the haiku of Bart Mesotten. He has now given over his jobs in the organization to others, but he still continues to write haiku. This large and beautifully made book is also an honor to Mesotten who was winner of the Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Award in 2000.

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The next deadline
 is 
January 1, 2005

Read book reviews in previous issues of Lynx

XVIII-3 Book Reviews
XVIII-2 Book Reviews
XVIII-1 Book Reviews
XVII:3 Book Reviews
XVII:2 Book Reviews
XVII:1 Book Reviews
XVI:3 Book Reviews
XV:2 Book Reviews
XV:3 Book Reviews
XVI:1 Book Reviews
XVI:2 Book Reviews
XVIII:3 Book Reviews
XIX:1 Book Reviews
XIX:2 Book Reviews

Read the previous issues of Lynx:

XV:2 June, 2000
XV:3 October, 2000
XVI:1 February, 2001
XVI:2 June, 2001
XVI:3 October, 2001
XVII:1 February, 2002
XVII:2 June, 2002
XVII:3 October, 2002
XVIII:1 February, 2003
XVIII:2 June, 2003
XVIII:3, October, 2003
XIX:1, February, 2004
XIX:2 June, 2004