Poetry

The Essential Haiku edited by Robert Haas (Bloodaxe £12)

POSSIBLY the smallest, yet among the most welcome, Japanese gift to the world is the haiku, the miniature, three-line poem. A best-seller in America since it was first published there in 1994, this collection presents 100 haikus from each of three Japanese masters, spanning three centuries up to the late 19th Century. The editor contributes a definitive introduction to the haiku, in which one of his opening examples is certain to make most readers want more: Don’t worry, spiders, I keep house Casually.

Travel Light Travel Dark by John Agard (Bloodaxe £9.95)

RECENTLY honoured with the Queen’s Medal for Poetry – only the second black writer to receive the award in its 80-year history – Guyana-born John Agard has enriched British poetry for more than three decades. Cross-cultural themes and techniques distinguish his work, as in one poem here in calypso rhythm and another imagining the thoughts of the English oak from which the ship that made the first journey to the New World was built.

Agard’s verse is lively and lucid, and his poems often conclude with an unexpected, thought-provoking twist. A hoodie appears “like monk with suspicious swagger..

should we ring for the police/ Or get down on our knees?”

As Far As I Know by Roger McGough (Penguin £8.99)

THERE’S more than a little sunset touch about Roger McGough’s latest collection.

“Not for me a young man’s death... My nights are rarely unruly/ my days of all-night parties/ are over, well and truly.”

Still, if anyone can brighten the coming dark it’s got to be Gough, now in his mid 70s and probably Britain’s most popular poet. He kicks off here positively enough: “Take comfort from this./ You have a book in your hand/ Not a loaded gun or a parking fine/ or an invitation to the wedding/ Of the one you should have married.”

But thoughts of mortality predominate – which is not to say there is gloom. Nissan will be delighted with his Ode to the Leaf: “Cornering too fast/ He came to grief/ Spun out of control/ Turned over a new Leaf.”

RS.Thomas – Uncollected Poems edited by Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies (Bloodaxe £9.95)

ON his death in 2000, aged 87, R S Thomas, the Welsh Anglican priest who is one of the foremost poets of the 20th Century, left behind a large number of uncollected poems. Since most had been published, in magazines, journals or special editions, why Thomas excluded them from his 25 published collections is not clear.

Of course, Wales looms large: “Friends? I never had any./ Acquaintances?

Two or three./ My intimacy was with/ the past. I was caretaker/ of a gallery of dead/ heroes.” There are tender poems, not least Birthday, addressed to his wife of more than 50 years: “Come to me a moment, stand,/ Ageing yet lovely still,/ At my side.”

Omnesia (Remix); Omnesia (Alternative Text). Both by W N Herbert, (Bloodaxe £9.95)

AN intriguing, mind-stretching endeavour – two volumes with near-identical covers.

Among the slight differences is the bracketed , small-type addition to the title. The poet explains the volumes as “doppelgangers haunted by the idea of a whole neither can embody or know”.

Hinting at amnesia, his “omnesia” rests on the idea that while the human race sees itself as omniscient, in fact it chooses to ignore wisdom from the past. Written as Herbert travels the world, the professor of poetry and creative writing at Newcastle University, says: “Hopefully they make one sense read in isolation, and a further read together.”