NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON-LINE

Blithe Spirit is the journal of the British Haiku Society and is packed with haiku and related verse forms, articles and reviews. This issue has a slight Eastern European focus with three pages of beautiful haiku from Croatia on themes of loss, sorrow and hope and Zinovy Vayman's article HAIKU IN RUSSIA that outlines the history and importance of haiku in Russian literature, along with examples.

Elsewhere in this issue, articles draw parallels between haiku and sport, muse on the essence of tanka and offer a taxonomy of haiku. This last (HAIKU TEMPLATES by Dick Petitt) though interesting, for me seems an unnecessary complication of this most concise and simple of art forms. John Carley's MATSUO BASHO: HAIKU FOR THE 21ST CENTURY takes us through a short literary history of Japan, exploring Basho's contributions to the art from and looking at his legacy. The article is followed by a renku — a collaborative work, where several writers work together producing separate but interlinking haiku. This particular renku NIJUIN: THE EMPTY STREET by Frank Williams, John Carley, Dick Pettit and Paul Conneally ranges across themes including the girl next door, parents mourning at their child's grave and a statue of the Buddha, as well as traditional imagery from the natural world, including this beautiful haiku from John Carley:

	perched on the tip 
	of the tallest of reeds
	a waxing moon.

a tangential exploration of the group psyche.

	the new moon
	sharpens 
	in an owl's eye.

An interesting mix of haiku, senryu, tanka and haibun, grouped under a theme or writer or just interminable masses of them from many poets lumped together fairly indiscriminately. There is a section on autumn with a large number of poems, of which the following by John Parsons is a fine example:

	mist in the valley
	and aching joints
	how near    last summer

	Origin of a circle—
	A wasp paddles
	In a floating world

	A waiting moment
	the train's pull and departure—
	the world gliding past

		washing up
		a bumble bee gently nuzzles
		the window pane

	answering a phone call from
	his daughter—
	dissembled gruffness

	in a shop window
		a strange old man
			recognises   myself

	Solo—a young man
	plays 'Sur le Pont d'Avignon'
	on a tin whistle
	under his own cloud in the
	sunlit square—no one dances

the essence of haiku is that it does not contain the poet's complete feeling or thought but leaves a space for each reader to develop images different from those of the poet; this creates a second and a third conceptual world. This is the charm and the heart of haiku.

the impulse to refine, purify, and to pare away in pursuit of the aim to produce a perfect encapsulation of a moment or an image.