Category Archives: Alba Publishing

Imagine…

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Imagine the thrill of having an outstanding USA writer-blogger choose to feature your book. So there’s me, living that for real. Thank you Charlotte Digregorio, been following your Daily Haiku for years, a daily gift of creme de la creme. And for your comments: ‘beautiful striking imagery… fresh expression… simplicity, yet elegance.’ See more here, along with double-filtered haiku.

At Shropshire BHS spring haiku gathering.

Thanks, too for her credit to my cover artist and creative sister Meg Kaczyk currently having a painting – poetry ekphrasis exhibition at the Northwind Art Grover Gallery in Port Townsend, Washington, USA.

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Me and my bookend sister

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When people compliment the cover of my haiku collection I’m extra-specially happy — because it’s praise of my bookend sister. I’m the oldest of six siblings, the writer at the top. She’s the youngest , the art one, Meg Kaczyk  I made my career with words — copywriting, feature writing, teaching writing, books. She made her career with graphic arts, and now with her own paintings, and teaching art.

So of course when I was bringing out The Extraordinary Dr Epstein, I asked Meg to do the cover. Besides being an art director she is of course a greatgranddaughter of Ephraim Epstein! Then, five years later, I asked her for cover art for The Walk Home

Meg’s own style is free, exuberant, with strong colour, strong movement (like her! She dances too.) She took up my request and a literal idea I gave her and offered me several choices, including several brand new works.  Though I loved them, they felt too strong for haiku. Oh dear! — the internal battle in me between loyalty to my book and loyalty to my sister. Could I say no? I’m glad we are both professionals. I looked on her website (click here), and there I found the softer visual sound of haiku.

She now has a copy of ‘her’ book/my book. I own two of her works and now I’m saying to everyone including the Chiswick Book Festival, happening now online, here’s the art of my big little sister Meg. As well as creative bookends we are geographic bookends too — me in London, she in Discovery Bay near Seattle. Just all of the Atlantic Ocean and the USA (and our four siblings) in between us.

 

Senses peeled

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‘Look around, look around you,’ Eliza Hamilton’s song to her husband Alexander Hamilton is one of my current earworms — along with many others from Hamilton, the energetic, intelligent, amazing musical. Look around. Some of us are emerging from corona virus lockdown, our senses newly raw to the wider world. So you might think today’s tweeted haiku is current, what with so many cafes still sadly closed.

closed café
emerald grass grows
in the awning gutter

But, honest guv, I wrote it in 2008. I don’t know how others do it, but when I scrawl a possible haiku, I write the date. And when I get to typing it, I make a brief note of the circumstance when the haiku occurred. In this case: 6/9/08, Kew Road en route to Richmond.

After one rejection (though actually in haiku-world it’s not really rejection; more like non-acceptance), I got round to sending it out again four years later. The British Haiku Society journal Blithe Spirit published it in summer 2012, bless! And I chose to put it in my 2020 retrospective haiku book The Walk Home

So, a bit raw, newly tuned to the strangeness of things, use this time. Look around.

The photo was taken along Chiswick Mall in October 2016. This turns out to be a time travel blogpost.

the place where it happened

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There I was, driving along the 316, skirting Richmond town centre. And it was raining. Hard. Some wind, too. And

the water meadow
mist, rain and a slanting man
with his umbrella
fills me with nostalgia
for a place I’ve never been

It was like, not-like, sort-of-like a Japanese woodblock print, you know, Hokusai or similar. And I felt it.  All in one drive-by flash, the flood water meadows of Richmond. Too much in the moment for a haiku so it had to be a tanka. This one turned out to be exactly to form: 5-7-5-7-7. The pleasure of tanka being the privilege, indeed necessity of naming emotions (in the last two lines).

Delighted to say that this tanka appeared in this month’s Blithe Spirit. Click here for The British Haiku Society

you be the editor

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Ooops, here’s another variation on first go and the final appearance in The Walk Home.

in the small hours
thunder growls between
my husband’s snores

The above was on Twitter a few days back. Whereas, I should have put the book’s version:

in the small hours
between my husband’s snores
thunder growls

The deciding issue with editor Kim Richardson (see books page) was that dangling word ‘between’ which really does belong with my husband. And his snores. And to move ‘between’ down would leave ‘thunder growls’ rather too starkly short, with a very long final line. So the new version has the classic haiku shape; not that we worry so much about strict haiku rules anymore. What’s more important is the little surprise or twist of the final line. After all, following ‘between my husband’s snores’ instead of my haiku moment of thunder it could be: ‘I snatch some sleep’ ‘I sigh’ ‘I poke him in the ribs’ ‘silence reigns’ or… go on, you do one.

Today’s haiku on Twitter — well I just did not have a photo to fit. You just had to be there. Which is, after all, the point of haiku.

full moon
we walk the night meadow
white grass either side

fooling around

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summer’s open window
lets in the sound of distance

After posting a dozen haiku here day by day, and feeding them through to Twitter, now I am trying a reverse. That is, posting haiku and photo (there’s a name for that: haiga) on Twitter and feeding them through to this blogsite. I wasn’t wild about the way the blogsite comes through as a tweet. So… we shall see. Feeling free to feel experimental. 

summer’s open window was yesterday on Twitter. Eeep! I’ve just realised that I tweeted the pre-edit version of today’s haiku — sun after rain — so I have just deleted it. To re-do, with my actually moving plashing fountain too. So which do you prefer? Here’s the one that’s in the book, thanks to lovely editor Kim Richardson of Alba Publishing. Followed by the original version.

sun after rain
silver water in spate
from the drain pipe

sun after rain
silver water gushes
from the drain pipe

It really was gushing. But… gush isn’t a very pleasant word, somehow.