MORE READERS' BOOK COMMENTS

Haiku and Tanka Harvest, published last December 23, 2011 is available at Amazon and its publisher's site: https://www.createspace.com/3737478

MORE READERS’ COMMENTS

“I received my copy of Haiku and Tanka Harvest today in the mail. I am enjoying all your work very much. A special thanks for including “For Darrell” in this book. I appreciate very much you including this poem in memory of my wife, Alice. We have both lost our life mates in the normal course of living. Poetry such as yours eases the pain. It reminds us that we will all be together again. On the other side.”

- Darrell Byrd, poet member of the Southern California Haiku Study Group

“Haiku and Tanka Harvest is simply wonderful! It is beautiful, inside and out. The cover is extraordinarily striking. I've been trying to make the first reading last, to savor each poem the first time through, but it's very hard to do that, because as soon as I read one poem I can't wait to get to the next. So, I'll read every one, and absorb and savor them more slowly with subsequent readings. I'm enjoying your prose very much, too. Your work has heart; reading it is such a joy. Susumu's and Marjorie's introductions are marvelous, warm and enlightening. What a significant and satisfying literary gift you have created!"

- Ferris Gilli, Associate Editor, The Heron's Nest

“Victor is probably more of a settler than a traveller. His job as a librarian must have given him intellectual detachment and the power of keen observation. His humility and honesty have opened a shortest route to truths. They also seem to have made him able to accept “the unknowable” and “the undoable” calmly. With this detachment and calmness he enjoys what life can offer him. All this, without being armed with Zen, Oriental mysticism, or cumbersome Western haiku theory and rules.

year end
thinking of what ifs
and what might have beens

Luckily for him, Victor is a natural for haiku. However, that is only half the story. The other half tells us that he makes tremendous efforts to be better, listens attentively, observes like a scientist and opens his heart to what is there for everybody to see.

In answer to my question he says, “Haiku enable me to see the world as it is, warts and all, and embrace any and all happenings both in nature itself and human nature, with me remaining non-judgmental yet involved. It requires discipline yet makes me aware of macro and micro happenings around me.”

And whatever happens around him, Victor’s heart remains with his late wife.

dining alone
the pipe-in music plays
our love song"

- Susumu Takiguchi, Chairman of The World Haiku Club and editor of its World Haiku Review. Excerpts from Susumu’s Introduction to Haiku in the book Haiku and Tanka Harvest.