Honoured to be one of 17 poets chosen for this anthology. My thanks to editors Jim Kacian and Julie Warther for selecting the following poems, and for their lovely commentary:
Strange's keen pictorial sense is on display throughout these poems, and it comes as no surprise to learn that she is a painter and photographer—these poems brim with tableaux. It is a simple matter for her to have us visualize a field of lupine leading on to a mirroring sky, a pika daubed gold, and the dim illumination of swans on a night pond. But she is also a storyteller—there are volumes suppressed behind a father's plough, an unknown sibling, an extended stretch of knitted silence. In a sense, then, we can reckon her haiku to be extremely condensed haibun, with the prose to be provided by the reader, and the haiku, as is most common (and just as she tells her stories) beginning at the end. Add to this her felicity with images and we recognize her to be a multimedia artist in the long tradition of haiku poets, like Buson, for whom all the arts were in play.
fields of lupine
where does the sky
begin
deserted farm
the random acts
of hollyhocks
porch swing
songs where we least
expect them
rusty sun
father's plough returns
to the earth
unmarked grave . . .
a thousand red maples
offer their leaves
the sister
I didn't know I had . . .
rhizomes
pine forest . . .
the advice I'd give
my younger self
moonless . . .
a dark lake lit
with swans
marsh reeds
we learn the secret
language of wind
owling . . .
we wait for the other side
of silence
city sirens
the wolves that used to
sing us home
on the taiga a glimpse of something bigger
alpenglow
a pika gathers stems
of light
firelight knitting another length of silence
river stories
we always begin
at the end
Publication Credits:
Stardust Haku 22
The Heron's Nest XXI:3
Modern Haiku 48.3
The Cicada's Cry (2020)
THF Haiku Dialogue Week 19 (2019)
The Heron's Nest XXII:2
Soka Matsubara International Haiku Competition
The Heron's Nest XIX:2
Akitsu Quarterly Fall (2019)
Modern Haiku 50.3
Shamrock Haiku Journal 42
Presence 58
Iris International Haiku Magazine 5
Wales Haiku Journal Haiga Gallery (2018)
Under the Basho (2017)
"porch swing" appeared in Prairie Interludes, the Snapshot Press eChapbook Awards winner (2020), which was also shortlisted for The Haiku Foundation Distinguished Books Award (2020); "pine forest" received an Honorable Mention in the Soka Matsubara International Haiku Competition (2020); "city sirens" was the runner-up senryu for the Shamrock Haiku Journal Readers' Choice Awards (2019); "alpenglow" received a commendation in A Little Haiku Contest by the Croatian haiku magazine Iris (2018).
