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

Robert Epstein (ed.). Dreams Wander On: Contemporary
Poems of Death Awareness. Baltimore, MD: Modern English
Tanka Press. 2011, 131 pp., perfect softbound, 6 x 9. ISBN
978-1-935398-24-0, 18.95 USD, .
by Bruce England, Santa Clara, California
Robert Epstein is a psychotherapist, a widely published haiku
poet, and an editor of anthologies of emotionally charged topics.
The title of his new anthology, Dreams Wander On: Contemporary
Poems of Death Awareness, is taken from what is
generally considered Bashō’s death haiku.
Sick, on a journey,
Yet over withered fields
Dreams wander on. 1
This is the second volume in a yet to be determined number
of anthologies. The first was The Breath of Surrender: A Collection
of Recovery-Oriented Haiku, and Epstein is currently
working on a third, The Temple Bell Stops: Contemporary Poems
of Grief, Loss and Change.
This anthology is a showcase for poems on death awareness.
The poems are intended to be written “with awareness of
one’s own mortality, not someone else’s.” 2 This might suggest
a similarity to Yoel Hoffmann’s Japanese Death Poems. 3
For the most part, these are not summary of life or farewell to
life poems in the sense of traditional Japanese death poems. I
would say the two books complement each other. Hoffmann’s
book reflects a well-established Japanese cultural tradition
among monks, nobles, warriors, and haiku poets, while Epstein’s
book is our own expression of what could become a
tradition among English language haiku writers.
As I count, there are 185 contributors and 382 poems. The list
of contributors contains a good mix of well-known and not so
well known haiku writers. The poems include haiku, senryu,
tanka, short poems and haiga. The author wrote the preface,
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86 Haiku Society of America