The Healing Spirit of Haiku

Through essential imagery and intelligent word craft, Dr. David Rosen, Joel Weishaus, and illustrator Arthur Okamura have co-created a profoundly reflective work that is housed within the subtle, delicate lacework of human mystery as it is captured in glimpses by this seasoned collaboration of poets and artists. Because this is a collaborative work, we see not only an individual human path through haiku, but how these separate individual paths inform a higher mystery as they converge, separate, fall into sync, compliment one another, press each other into further discovery. This is a book to be read and reread, straight through or in bits and pieces, to thumb through over morning tea, close your eyes and point to a haiku to meditate with during the day. Most significant to me is the authors' meditation not only on haiku as a poetic form, but as a means of healing. These poets offer individual testimony of moments of archetypal breadth that are captured through the expansive snapshot of haiku, from the pangs of the death of ego to the surrender of the death of loved ones; and how a plate of pancakes can remind us of old wisdom.