A Sky Full of Bucket Lists Review: Japanese Flavours, Local Cuisine
Shobhana Kumarâs book is a timely intervention to a growing subset of Indian poetry.
Representative image. Photo: Yellow Mao/Flickr CC BY NC ND 2.0
Rabindranath Tagore recollected his first visit to Japan in 1916 in his book
Japan Jatri, where he first introduced the haiku into Bengali. Translating the 17th-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, Tagore wrote: âThe heart of the Japanese people does not sound like a waterfall; it is quiet like a lake.â Since then, the haiku â and other Japanese forms such as haibun, tanka, and senryu â have become increasingly popular in Indian languages. In a 1992 article for
The invisible is nudged into half-light in this collection of haibun
My childhood was spent in the Blue Mountains, Nilgiris, surrounded by a faultlessly blue sky, endless stretches of hills, and a gentle people,” Shobhana Kumar says in her introduction to her collection of haibun a Japanese form in which haiku are interleaved with prose. It is to these words that I found myself returning after having read the book. For they felt somehow like clues to the work, almost a foreshadowing of the gentleness and the spaciousness that I had just encountered.
“How do you touch a place that is unnamed yet?” That is the question ‘Lethologica’, a wry investigation into the nature of pain, poses. The haiku that follows is not so much a response as a deliberate detour, a deft linking and shifting characteristic of the Japanese poetic tradition: “meditation/ learning to focus/ despite pins and needles”.
Town north of Honolulu evacuated as stream floods
AUDREY McAVOY and MARK THIESSEN, Associated Press
March 10, 2021
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1of8Floodwaters sweep over Hana Highway near West Kuiaha Road in Haiku, Maui, Hawaii, on Monday, March 8, 2021. Heavy rains caused a dam to overflow on the Hawaiian island of Maui, and and nearby residents in the community of Haiku are being evacuated, county officials said Monday.(Kehaulani Cerizo/The Maui News via AP)Kehaulani Cerizo/APShow MoreShow Less
2of8A house on Haleiwa Road is surrounded by floodwaters Tuesday, March 9, 2021, in Haleiwa, Hawaii. Torrential rains have inundated parts of Hawaii for the past several days. (Jamm Aquino/Honolulu Star-Advertiser via AP)Jamm Aquino/APShow MoreShow Less
Haiku for Healing Project Remembers Those Lost to COVID-19 Feb 18, 2021 at 11:51 am by WGNS
MURFREESBORO, TN Poetry in the Boro has launched a new project to help Rutherford County and surrounding Middle Tennessee communities remember, heal, and grieve in the wake of the pandemic. Haiku for Healing invites anyone who lives in the area to submit information about a loved one lost to COVID-19. A team of area poets will use that information to write a haiku that will be shared on Poetry in the Boro s social media accounts.
“Just as churches have rung their bells to help communities acknowledge and grieve their losses, we poets want to express our love and concern,” said Poetry in the Boro founder Kory Wells.
As a kid, I grew up just outside New York City in my elementary school years and in Rhode Island during high school and university years.
From New York, you could hop the train and be in Philadelphia or Washington, D.C., within hours. From Rhode Island, we would go to Maine for breakfast and Connecticut for donuts.
Then I moved to Texas.
In my early 30s, work took me to the Houston region, which has ended up being a place I truly love. The challenge, though, for this inveterate rambler whose rush comes from experiencing new territory is that, from Houston, you have to drive more than nine hours when heading westward to get out of Texas.