Is something else the tide won’t wash away. The dotted line my father’s ash plant made (as it appears in Seeing Things (Faber and Faber, 1991) Donegal Haiku (Dedalus Press, 2013) a sequence of haiku, inspired by his beloved Errigal, was published in the last year of his life. Moya Cannon has referred to him as “ a Basho-like figure”. She started composing haiku in late 1960s, and a few of them appeared in her 1968 collection titled Horse by the River (Dolmen Press, 1968), followed by a few more that found their way to her 1985 collection, Eternity Smith (Dolmen Press, 1985).įrancis Harvey’s poetry was firmly earthed in the Donegal landscape that was his home for much of his life. A travelling woman born in England of Irish parents, she spent a significant part of her life in Co.

The first Irish poet to write haiku as we know them was Juanita Casey. Perhaps that is why Kavanagh did not realize he had written a haiku since haiku are not known for having titles. Patrick Kavanagh wrote a single haiku, probably not suspecting that it was a haiku. In his haiku, the first line is actually the title of the poem. The latter I tweet on New Year’s Day every year. My favourite Irish haiku is that of Seamus Heaney, quoted below in two versions, one from the Bamboo Dreams anthology (with accompanying photograph) and one from his Seeing Things (Faber and Faber, 1991) collection with the title 1.1.87. Pat Boran also uses rhyme and has offered, as quoted below, a prosodic approach to the genre. Paul Muldoon is often disdained by the purveyors of the classic haiku, but his use of rhyme and contrast brings a classic epigrammatic sensibility to bear on the Japanese form. In some, those of Francis Harvey and Pat Boran, a strong sense of place and landscape adds to the evocation. Reading it, however, with something less than contempt, I can find in Irish haiku, if not a place for the genuine, a place, beyond all the Irish fiddle-faddle, for the wry, the witty, the evocative and, sometimes, the artful. Some of my reservations are explored on the post devoted to erotic haiku. My attitude to the traditional haiku in English is somewhat like that of Marianne Moore towards poetry I, too dislike it. The names of Basho and Issa and Buson have found their way into our discourse to the extent that we in Ireland have learnt to recognise something Japanese in the earliest lyrics of the native tradition. Seamus Heaney, who has probably written the classic Irish haiku (see below) stated in The Guardian of 24 November 2007 that since the times of the imagists the haiku form and the generally Japanese effect have been a constant feature of poetry in English. the Irish haijin often use indirect metaphors, which is rather typical of Celtic haiku – and of Japanese, of course. Despite the variety of English-language haiku being written in Ireland, the Irish haiku movement is much closer to the Celtic stream than to the English one, or simply should be regarded as a part of the former. This determines the way the poets work with the material, not to mention that the material itself may vary a lot, as the nature can be strikingly different in various parts of the world. And it isn’t the local subject but rather the poetic traditions of the locality that matter. This doesn’t prevent us from customarily defining such schools of haiku writing as Japanese, American, Australian, English, French, or – dare we say it? – Celtic. The prominence of haiku in Irish poetry today is due, in large measure to the Russian-born Anatoly Kudryavitsky, editor of Shamrock Haiku Journal and compiler of the haiku in the classic anthology, Bamboo Dreams (Doghouse Books, 2012). In his introduction he asks and answers the question: should we speak of an Irish haiku tradition? One can argue that the concerns of haiku writers and the poetic devices they choose to use are similar all over the world, and have been since the times of Basho.

The Irish haiku developed later and tends to be more restrained. And, as I have discussed in various posts, there is an array of poems and poets that can be classed under that rubic from Richard Wright, who wrote thousands of these short poems in the last years of his life, through Allen Ginsberg, who created a form of haiku know as American Sentences, to Jack Kerouac, who created his own form of American haiku which he called pops. It may sound like an oxymoron but there is no more contradiction in the term than there is in American haiku.

Haiki face wash