Haori: Seven Movements of Being

By Julene M Cook

Haori is a richly layered Australian poetry collection that unfolds in cycles of ebb and flow as identity responds to the defining challenges of being human. Like the garment for which it is named, it weaves classic poetic craft with natural speech rhythms, vivid imagery, embodied detail, and resonant metaphors inspired by nature, art, and music. It situates experience within landscape, family legacies, and First Nations history and connections. Each poem opens a distinct emotional landscape, leading readers through early disillusionment and the tensions between expectation and experience, longing, attraction, love, illness, trauma, and loss, but also experiences of wonder and wholehearted engagement with others and the natural world. The poems offer a deeply reflective journey that resonates through multiple levels of meaning and emotion, lingering long after the page is turned.

Structured as a seven-movement poetic suite, Haori unfolds like a musical composition. Each movement opens with a haiku and a visual image symbolising its theme. Read in sequence, the movements gather cumulative emotional and reflective momentum. Individual poems resonate with one another, revealing patterns of meaning that transcend individual circumstances. The journey culminates in experiential insights and a hard-won sense of identity, secure enough to release what no longer matters and allow eventual reconnection with a larger continuity of being.

Many of the poems are also available as song-cycle recordings and multimedia presentations that add further layers of meaning, deepen emotional power, and put poetry into a three-dimensional contemporary context.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1764640004
• ISBN13: 9781764640008
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Crafting Meaning Press
• Length: 142 Pages
• Weight: 0.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.8" x 8.3"