Haiku

The roots of Japanese haiku reach back over a thousand years. The timeless appeal of this understated poetic form may be the human desire to capture one's impressions of a fleeting moment. In the poem as in life, there is a pause, a shift, in which the poet celebrates sensory awareness of the season, perhaps suggested by the joyful song of a sparrow or the soft fall of snow on bamboo. Such seasonal allusions emphasize the essence of haiku: nature and its ephemeral beauty. Each of the poems in this boxed notecard assortment is rendered in Japanese calligraphy, a transliteration, and a translation. The prints reproduced were drawn from the extensive collections of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.