I've just finished reading "Stallion's Crag - haiku and haibun" (Iron Press) by the wonderful Welsh writer Ken Jones. I wrote about my fascination with the Hafren (River Severn) in a previous post and, of course, the river rises on Plynlimon, the setting for this 6,000 word prose poem. Its remoteness, its wildness, its magical compulsion are all captured by the beautiful descriptions and the interspersed haiku in the book - "a mysterious whiff of something strange yet somehow familiar".
The author states in his Preface that he hopes the collection "will encourage others, on both sides of Offa's Dyke, to try their hands at haiku and haibun." Ah, how deceptively simple the forms look! Anything but in the actual execution .... although I have made one or two attempts (witness the haiku below, included in an account of an early morning walk) and I shall certainly work on them.
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glimmers of sunlight
quicken the dawdling brook
ghosts of millwheels turn |
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