Black Haiku

At the bookshop where I work, he comes to talk to me about Spanish ships, hot-air balloons named after beasts, polar expeditions lost in mirrors. (And only someone in my line of work recognises that scent of damp bread and mustiness that books leave behind.) As time goes by, I realise that one of his eyes is glass. More specifically, one of his eyes is a glass marble, the sort known in my childhood as ‘gazes’. That is where all his misfortunes begin. On certain days, unnamed by meteorologists, the glass creaks with its ancient sands. A desert wind rearranges the lines of his face. He is left all alone; the shop window startles him, preventing him from stepping inside. ‘No, sir,’ I reply politely, ‘we don’t have books about Spanish ships. We sell blank paper.’

In the aftermath of the Pandemic and in the shadow of two wars, Black Haiku focuses on the fragility of all certainty, the cracks in security, the betrayal of habit, the blind spots of theory and the panic of logic, the optical illusions of the self-evident and the sleight of hand with which we deceive ourselves. It re-examines reality within and beyond us with persistence, seeking poetic dynamism in dry information and metaphorical value in encyclopaedic facts, drawing upon the tragedy of the news and the flashes of everyday life. Time in all its forms – geological, historical, biological – as an experiment, sustenance and trial; the beauty of intellectual stripping down and the physical imprint of memory, are among the themes the book explores. The Black Haiku is being published simultaneously in Greek by Ikaros Publications, in Bulgarian by Janet 45, Plovdiv, and in English as part of the poetry collection Notes of the Phantom Woman, Ugly Duckling Presse, NY, translated by John O’Kane and Ekaterina Petrova.