TIME’S BARTER

At their best, these haiku – full of rain, land clouds, plums and (like the Japanese) cherries, domestic life, city vistas and uncliched vignettes of the abundant nature for which his land is renowned – richly exemplify the three defining features which Tony Conran has isolated as the essence of haiku: ‘loneliness, tenderness and slenderness’. Then there are the characteristic attributes of brevity, concision, simplicity, presence, sensory directness and present-tense immediacy. There’s a quality of profound attention, often to minutiae, and a sharpness of observation mediated by down-to-earth, unembellished language.The quality of his haiku writing has already been recognized in Wales, where the leading cultural magazine Planet: the Welsh Internationalist has recently published in its pages a selection of his haiku. One looks forward, now, to seeing what ripples they might make on the still youthful haiku scene of India.