Falling Awake

Haiku began in Japan some 900 years ago. It was written by scholars, by saki-sipping party animals and by swashbuckling samurai. It's very much alive today, all over the world. Falling Awake is a collection of contemporary American haiku written by a group of Colorado writers who revel in the restraint and freedom of this venerable form that has so many expressions--it can be delicate, meditative, deeply moving, startling, whimsical, laugh-out-loud funny, and sometimes, enigmatic. If you thought you learned all about haiku in 3rd grade, you're in for a happy surprise.

One haiku is a happy accident--something took your breath away and you found a way to put it into words. But writing haiku can become a habit. Gradually, it becomes a practice that leads you down a path of observation and witness. The result is a sharpening of the senses. A deeper appreciation of ordinary things that are suddenly, quietly, extraordinary. Matsuo Basho spent the last years of his life as a literary pilgrim traveling through Japan on foot, pausing to write and teach haiku. Falling Awake is high plains Colorado haiku. It invites you to walk through the seasons of the year as experienced by contemporary Western writers, beginning in the fall as "heavy-headed sunflowers sleepily nod" in September heat and someone makes jam as "grape scent stains kitchen air." While in winter, "silent plains flow into the sky"as "tracks tarnish newly fallen snow recording life and death." Haiku is timeless but also exists within a frame of place and experience. Many of these poems document the experience of the pandemic. "Time sifts--settles on my shoulders. Covid house arrest." And "quarantined...my only visitor a ray of sunshine." And "locked playgrounds empty pools masked runners, despite the heat we are all on thin ice." Soon spring arrives, and a "single green shoot rises from a pile of dead leave--hope is a soldier." And "an ancient blue spruce sighs in the morning breeze" as spring yields to summer heat and by July, "sun-cracked earth" is battered by sporadic monsoon rains. The book concludes with nonseasonal poems that meditate on life and loss and moments of joy. Most haiku are three lines. But you will also find two-line haiku, one-line haiku (monoku) and other variations, including a small selection of haiga ( illustrated haiku) and haibun (prose that features a haiku.)