Reed Shadows

by John Wills and John Wills

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0920349021
• ISBN13: 9780920349021
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Burnt Lake Press
• Length: 111 Pages

Customer Reviews

Rediscovery of the beauty and grace in nature and everyday life

As a Japanese poet myself, I was largely influenced and moved by his being and works. His haiku restored my relationship with nature and the grace of life. The beautiful discovery of the essence and the tresurable secret in ordinary life.

magnum opus of a revered haijin

Wills joined the North American haiku scene in 1968, during a time of transition away from the early orthodoxies of the movement. Wills himself became one of the first haijin to write a sparer type of haiku, liberated from 5-7-5 syllabic structure and the traditions of western typography. This collection, published in 1987, contains nearly all his best published work. Wills' background was in lit (PhD from Washington University in St. Louis, taught at university level for many years). After spending time studying haiku in Japan on a research grant, he left academia and lived as a subsistence farmer, an experience that probably helped give his work its pure, focused, supremely uncluttered quality. Along with Robert Spiess, he's perhaps the most persuasive and observant naturalist among North American haijin, his haiku inspiration deriving almost exclusively from the American wilderness. He's capable of magnificent compression-- boulders just beneath the boat it's dawn --which juxtaposes the four classical elements of earth, water, air, and fire and documents a classic haiku moment of transition (with a hint of menace) in just nine syllables. Elsewhere we find pointed humor: keep out sign but the violets keep on going Unforgettable images: mule dragging dawn across the ridge (clearly modeled on Virgilio's "bass/picking bugs/off the moon", the poem that first turned Wills onto haiku) And self-deprecation in his appropriately rare personal cameos: the footpath narrows laurel branches take me by the sleeve Wills experimented with single-line haiku, meter, portmanteau words, and expressive typography, notably the use of tabs to indicate silence, space, and elapsed time. His work, both in terms of content and technique, remains a great inspiration to haijin everywhere.

The Best American Haiku

This is a wonderful book that demonstrates how well the haiku form can work in English. It has a distinctly American feel but the same concentration as in the great Japanese poets. Truly exceptional.