This thin book is packed with haiku, five to seven per designed page, plus the philosophy of haiku and some very interesting black-and-white drawings and photographs, revealing the author/poet’s experiences in haiku form.
Kenneth Faught, retired United Methodist pastor, college professor, and professional counselor, lives in Tennessee, and is like a sculptor-scholar tooling a block as he introduces the haiku form and then demonstrates it with more than 100 examples of his own. He’s produced what might be called a memoir in haiku, plus a few other poems at the end.
His introduction communicates well, in compact prose, how haiku can be a spiritual practice. (See the excerpt accompanying this review for a sample of this.) Two short appendices: “A Very Short History of Haiku” and “A Short Haiku Vocabulary” follow the collection of poems.
We found this to be an extended practice of being present and a demonstration of how to respond to the world’s beauty with humility and wonder. It is also a paean to what Faught has loved, which clearly includes home, sycamores, God, monasticism (there are frequent visits to Thomas Merton’s Abbey of Gethsemani, plus references to him and to a former novice of Merton’s, Brother Paul Quenon, still living there — a poet and memoirist who has inspired Faught), the Gospel, walks in the woods, Zen, and Basho (an earlier Zen master of the haiku form).
Faught’s simple approach may cause readers to begin to see their own lives in moments of three lines, counting the syllables.
