The Haiku Foundation Librarian’s Cache: Poet of the Month – Alan Summers

 

Librarian’s Cache: 

Poet of the Month – Alan Summers

by Dan Campbell

https://thehaikufoundation.org/librarians-cache-poet-of-the-month-alan-summers/

I am delighted to be given the honor of being Poet of the Month by The Haiku Foundation.

 

Last Train Home: an anthology of contemporary haiku, tanka, and rengay

Launched on February 26, 2021 by Jacqueline Pearce  (editor) 

LAST TRAIN HOME is an international collection of haiku and related poetry about trains and train travel. Edited by award-winning Canadian poet and children's book author Jacqueline Pearce, the anthology features close to 600 haiku, tanka, rengay, and haiku sequences by 193 poets from 22 different countries.

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Train-Home-anthology-contemporary/dp/1999180801/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=last+train+home&qid=1617702851&sr=8-3

This is a gorgeously produced book that is not only for fans of trains, stations, and travel by rail, for adventure or romance, or both, but anyone who misses the sheer atmosphere of a train racing through cities and countryside!

Here are a few of Jacquie's newer haiku about trains (lately, they are more about her local transit trains):

 

heat wave

the night train rumbles

into my wakefulness

 

Skytrain whine

my thoughts become

white noise

 

subway tunnel

a waft of warm air

takes me back

 

And one of Jacquie's own favourite haiku (by her) from the anthology:

 

warm prairie breeze

the porter plays harmonica

in the open door

 

Jacquie says:

"I like it because it takes me back to my first long-distance train trip across Canada with my brother in the early 1980s (with our VIA Rail youth passes). We were on a quiet branch line between Calgary and Edmonton that no longer exists, and it felt like we were travelling through the Old West—passing rolling prairie, roaming cattle, a bleached steer skull beside the tracks, the carriage doors left open to the warm September air as we travelled, the lonely sound of the harmonica…."

 

The photo by Jacqueline Pearce is from a similar part of the country, on a different train trip.

I'm fortunate to have a few of my own haiku in there, here's one:

train station

the heat of the platform

in my blood

Alan Summers

NHK World TV, Japan:

Europe meets Japan - Alan's Haiku Journey (September 2015)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VS36AGVI6s