Author Description

Product Description<br/><br/><br/>This is an award-winning collection of haiku poems representing an entire year of the poet's experiences while living in a tree house he built himself on a wooded island in the middle of a swamp, as he describes it on the back cover: out of sight in the hills of western Massachusetts.<br/><br/><br/>Review<br/><br/><br/>Writing haiku is not that human mind catches nature: nature has caught human mind. Although Jack Barry has apparently been publishing haiku for the last ten years I have only recently begun to see his work in major print and online journals. He is squarely in the traditional line of haiku; what he calls a nature-based art form. He lives in the rural area of Western Massachusetts and his haiku reflect the agrarian surroundings there. Haiku was formulated in an agrarian culture whose spiritual ideology was based on the revolutions of nature and their enacting agents. Look at a contemporary Japanese listing of annual celebrations and rituals for the truth of this. So unlike the traditional tanka that centers on the mind (emotion) as does most other forms of Japanese poetry, traditional haiku is centered on nature (feeling). Nature is felt in some way by the poet. They are drawn in some way to feel a given moment. As Barry states in his introduction: . . .haiku is for saying what is, before that moment disappears. . . . every lost moment, every fleeting interaction that disappears without notice renders our world that much less interesting, that much less vital, that much closer to being trampled by feet that aren't watching. (Introduction, p.1) He is clearly disturbed by what he perceives as the mutation of American haiku into yet another human-based reflection (Personal letter from Barry). Is he another extension of the Agrarian Movement in last century's American poetry or has he picked up the available path in the natural world that is the essence of haiku? Unfortunately, one would have to examine the whys and wherefo