Review: "The Heart of Haiku"...a great place to start!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 08 2, 2011
"The Heart of Haiku" is a small e-book written as a Kindle Single by Jane Hirshfield. It is a short 94 Kb download.This is a short biographical book about 17th century Japanese poet Basho. A figure that revolutionized poetry in his native land with his ongoing development of previous Japanese poetic structure and schemes into what is now known as Haiku.I knew very little about Haiku but this short work caught my eye, I downloaded the sample available to me on my Kindle and was hooked. Hirshfield has obviously studied Basho's life (within the limit of historical recordings made during his lifetime). She gives the readers some basic knowledge of his upbringing, his persist lifelong poverty, his artistic development/maturity (poetry) and finally some of his frustration and annoyances as he became older.Of course there are many examples of his Haiku poems...poems with only 17 sounds and in Western form are broken up into three lines. Short statements that superficially appear to have only the remotest (if any connection) until you study them a little more deeply. I found the explanations of some of the poems by Hirshfield  were particularly insightful. They helped to point the way so I could 'begin' to get a gist of the meaning what was presented before me.Conclusion:For the uninitiated, like myself...the most  basic of primers. But interesting and intriguing enough to make me want to learn more. 5 Stars.Ray Nicholson