Subtitle: Contemporary Japanese & English-Language Haiku in Cross-Cultural Perspective.
Winchester, VA: Red Moon Press, 2008. More details coming later . . .
With thanks to the author and publisher.
I’m really pressed for time, just now, so I’ll offer here the blurb I wrote on this as it was in press:
In Poems of Consciousness, Richard Gilbert investigates Japanese haiku in the flesh. He not only reports on what he has gleaned from books about haiku, but includes interviews with and writings by living Japanese haiku masters. Here you will meet some of today’s most widely respected poets. Kiyoko Uda has been at the forefront of haiku’s growing popularity among younger poets for the past several decades. She recently became president of the Modern Haiku Association–the most avant-garde of Japan’s major haiku organizations. Hasegawa Kai leads the contemporary reexamination of all our assumptions about the haiku of the past and points the way ahead for this new century. These and others provide striking poems–in Gilbert’s insightful translations–that will, along with his own provocative essays, make anyone familiar with the haiku genre rethink their understanding of this brand new poetry.
You’ll see a more fulsome review here in a few weeks. This is not a fast-food book, but one that requires careful attention, as one moves through its stages. One of these is a DVD-ROM containing extensive materials in the book and from his Gendai Haiku web site. The DVD is worth the price of admission, but there’s plenty more in the book, too.
See the publisher’s web page here.
Bill
Wordfield's Haikai Pub 