Haiku Love

Haiku poems about the natural world and the seasons are well known, but many poets have also used the haiku genre to capture the fleeting human experience. The selection presented in this book focuses on evocations of love.

Combining elegant and restrained haiku with lively senry­u poems, all aspects of romantic love are explored with humor, satire, wit and compassion. Poems from the 1600s to the present day are beautifully illustrated with images from the unrivaled collection of Japanese paintings and prints in the British Museum. The majority of the poems come from the Tokugawa period (early seventeenth to mid nineteenth centuries) and include works from the best-known Japanese classical authors, female poets and a number of contemporary writers. Nearly all are newly translated by Alan Cummings.

From the tender and the melancholy to the witty and the ribald, the poems and images in Haiku Love comment on the most universal of human emotions.