Librarian’s Cache:
Poet of the Month – Alan Summers
by Dan Campbell
I am delighted to be given the honor of being Poet of the Month by The Haiku Foundation.
Tuesday, April 06, 2021
Last Train Home: an anthology of contemporary haiku, tanka, and rengay
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.
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)