Red Leaves:
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From the Author's Preface: Sometimes we say too much. Words get in the way. Abstractions cloak perceptions and dull communication about real things. No wonder haiku are so popular all around the world. Brief and immediate they compress significant observations, experiences, and insights into images that engage the senses and feelings. I think of them as open-ended and open-handed poems, capable of receiving, being, and giving all at once. Expressed in simple language, they invite the reader to participate as co-creator. Sometimes they seem to leap from heart to heart. Like the great epics, haiku always begin “in the middle of things.” Unlike other literature, they stop in the space of a human breath, forming vibrant crystals ready to reactivate the tones of a moment’s experience. A good haiku offers just enough words, just the right words, to recreate the essence of a specific time and place and hold it permanently available. If tingles of heightened awareness inform the poet and the moment, they are likely to excite similar responses in a receptive reader, so that the haiku expands and resonates. ~ Peggy Lyles |
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SAMPLE HAIKU lightning flash
attic sun
sunlit reeds—
hard green peaches — |
into the afterlife red leaves ~ Peggy Lyles I think it is natural, after a poet has died, to read their poems differently. We all know that we are mortal and this knowledge is always somewhere in our poetry. But, since we also tend to deny what we know, this knowledge can seem suddenly more prominent after death has taken the poet. So far as I know, the monoku quoted above was not intended as a jisei — a death poem ... All the same, I have come to think of it in this way. And now I also think of it as perfectly emblematic of this extension of her selected haiku. The autumn leaves, in the last phase of their lives, present us with a final flair of warm colors. These late poems of Peggy Willis Lyles do the same thing for this reader. ~ John Stevenson |
How would I want you to read these pieces of the story of my life? Slowly. Individually. More than once. Preferably aloud. Above all, I want you to read them with assurance of their essential honesty, and faith that what you find in them is what they mean and are. I hope the poems link to your sensory perceptions and affirm a connection between what Robert Frost called inner and outer weather. I hope they touch your sense of wonder, stirring responses that make the sharing mutual. I hope they spark the desire, new or renewed, to write and share your own haiku. ~ Peggy Lyles |
RED LEAVES: Preface by John Stevenson TABLE OF CONTENTS To Hear the Rain (2002) Red Leaves (2023)
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