Frogpond 34.3 • Autumn 2011 (pdf) - Haiku Society of America

ook is sure to catch the attention of the target audience mentioned
in the subtitle. How to capture student interest and how
to write haiku and related forms such as tan renga, rengay, and
renku/renga take up half the book. How to compose haibun,
tanka and haiga take up the other half. To do justice to such
breadth of coverage, Carter includes insightful chapters from
prominent poet-educators such as Randy Brooks, LeRoy Gorman,
Penny Harter, Jim Kacian and Michael McClintock as
well as a number of expert others.
Accomplished poets and scholars, however, will have quibbles
with a table of contents that does not identify who wrote what.
For instance, “Part 7: Articles of inspiration for teachers and
students” lists only the titles of the articles. Thus, one has to
go to page 34 to find out that LeRoy Gorman wrote “The Haiku
Roadshow.” Perhaps Carter figured that a harried teacher
would consider the author’s name as information overload. A
second concern for scholars, especially, is that Carter often
does not reference her sources within the text. As a result,
the reader has to frequently guess from where the information
came when consulting the misnamed “Works Cited.” Also,
sometimes Carter get the facts wrong: Patrick Lane was not
the first Canadian to publish a collection of haiku (in 1984);
Claire Pratt was (in 1965), a fact to be found in my article
listed in her Works Cited, “The Haiku in Canada: The Formative
Years.” Apart from such concerns, of little interest to most
teachers, Carter’s book will be treasured by teachers desperate
to come up with a lesson plan for next week’s poetry topic.
Enăchescu, Adina AL. Esenţe Nipone / Nipponese Essences:
Haiku (Sorina Crihană-Dascălu translator). Bucharest: Editura
Societătii Scriitorilor Români, 2011, 178 pp., perfect softbound,
5.5 x 8. ISBN: 978-973-7700-80-3, no price and no e-mail or
street address. According to the “Foreword” and seven “Critical
References”at the back, Enăchescu, is a major Romanian
poet who turned to haiku about ten years ago. This book is a
selection of the best haiku previously published in five prior
collections from 2003 to 2008. When searching for good
haiku to quote here, I was frustrated by two problems with
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