In this new feature, the editors, as a group, will pick one haiku from the previous issue as the overall favorite. We'll each try to explain what we like about it and why we picked it. Then, on the second page of this feature, we will each pick an individual favorite from the previous issue and try to explain our choices.
Mark Brooks writes
I think this haiku shows us something of the lengths we go to in order to keep even a token of nature in our lives. Sure, this is overt humor with Sydney and the upside-down flowers. There is more at work here though and I think that is shown well in Kuniharu Shimizu's haiga interpretation.
As Alan mentions below, the effect of the haiku has changed since we first picked it out many months ago. The haiku, however, is strong, independent of what will come, for it is a mini-celebration of life.
alan j summers writes:
I went for this one because obviously there is a light touch of humour for a start. There were many strong contenders for overall favourite, all containing good aspects of humour within haiku. I often look for subtleness that avoids a loud laugh, and this has it for me.
Unfortunately in the advent of the horrific outrage on September 11 this has an added poignancy, and I cannot read it without thinking of the loss of so many innocents. But this does not subtract from the haiku, and in time maybe any connection we may make will fade. If it does, it does, but a haiku for me should always be contemporary, as if written only today.
Yu's haiku has this lightness, and I chose it before that terrible crime had been perpetrated, but for all that, it does have that added edge that was not intended, and is worth reading all the more. It has been said we should never forget humour in even the darkest moments; it is our right and bonus in life to be still able to laugh in these troubled times.
Serge Tomé writes:
Haiku logic is a fuzzy logic. This poem has no kigo, so ...
We appreciate haiku with a variable set of rules depending on each of us. A lack of the respect of the rules can be "made up" by the high quality of the rest. This one is a very good exemple. It contains some "magic". In the images and in the structure.
I like :
- its opposition structure in multiple levels. New York versus Sydney, North versus South, apartment versus the World, the inverted position of the rose, 'drying' versus Life. This haiku is a link, at various levels, between multiple dualities, between multiple "worlds".
- the idea these roses preserve is their memories of home. Like a compass, they are pointed to their 'home garden'. They resist to our way of life, even dried, even in Death. As if they wanted to retrieve their garden.
- "upside down" : something has happen, something magic.
Carmen Sterba writes:
It is unusual to see two proper names in a haiku, but this works because of the significance of the drying bouquet from "The land Down Under." These roses are obviously a welcome present since they are important enough to be saved as a decoration and souvenir. This haiku celebrates the diversity of the earth in a few succinct words.
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