Love Haiku: Japanese Poems of Yearning, Passion, and Remembrance

by Patricia Donegan and Yoshie Ishibashi

Book Overview

Haiku is celebrated as a concise form of poetry able to convey a singular moment with great clarity. While haiku most often depicts the natural world, when focused on the elements of love and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590306295
• ISBN13: 9781590306291
• Release Date: December 2009
• Publisher: Shambhala Publications
• Length: 209 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Flowing like a sea of cherry blossoms.

Haiku, an old form of Japanese poetry, captures a single moment in a few short words. While the main focus is on capturing nature, there are many haiku's that capture other events and emotions; and one of those emotions is love. In this collection, Patricia Donegan gives the reader a collection of love haiku, from the ancient masters to modern haiku poets, many of them in English for the first time. She splits the collection up into three parts: yearning, passion, and remembrance. The first part deals with that often one-sided, part of love, the yearning for someone to be your lover. The passion section is about the passionate affair between two people. The final part, remembrance, is all about remembering old loves long ago and wishing that they would return. Like other haiku, these are short and get to the point, delivering their message in short staccato bursts, that highlight the passion and pain that is love quickly and successfully. This is a collection for people who love the simplicity of haiku and love that poetic feeling of love. Reviewed by Kevin Winter

Pretty collection. A lovely gift.

I bought this book for my fiance because I adored Patricia Donegan's Haiku Mind. As I wrote in my blog, I loved this book as much as the other for different reasons. The splash pages with images by Yoshi Isabash are lovely and interspersed throughout the text without distracting from it. It is unfortunate that Donegan chose to mistranslate romaji and I hope that future editions of the book will correct this error. I especially love that the collection includes the romaji along with the English translation of each haiku, inviting the English student of Japanese to explore what translation choices are made for each haiku. A wonderful choice for inclusion.