In Haiku, the Gentle Art of Disappearing, a renowned Irish poet shows us how haiku may be used as a powerful tool for spiritual interpenetration. This implies that we divest ourselves of the ever-chattering mind, shed the voracious ego and enjoy momentary glimpses of unity with natural phenomena. In the companion volume, Haiku Enlightenment, he further explores these thoroughly delightful experiences and invites us to disappear! Haiku is dynamically focussed on the present, from season to season, from day to day, from hour to hour, from second to second. But how illusory, how fleeting is that present moment? How caught up is it with the past, with the future? Can we stop its flow? Are there more ways than one of experiencing its essence? If we experience a moment intensely enough, might we disappear? Surprises await those readers who may have considered haiku to be nothing more than an innocuous three-line poem. A renowned poet shares his experience of haiku and its potential to surprise us again and again into a sudden awakening and thus to a deeper sense of what it is to be truly alive. His remarkably refreshing insights have delighted confreres around the world.
About the Author: Gabriel Rosenstock, poet, haikuist, playwright, writing in Irish and English, is the author/translator of over 100 books. He is a member of Aosdana, the Irish Academy of Arts and Letters. He has worked in theatre, radio, television, print journalism and book publishing. Some titles of note include his selected poems (from the Irish) Portrait of the Artist as an Abominable Snowman, from Domhan Books, New York; Forgotten Whispers, haiku and senryu (Anam Press, Cork); Signs of Rain: Irish Weather Wisdom (Appletree Press, Belfast); Irish Proverbs: in Irish and English (Mercier Press, Cork and Dublin) and the compilation A Treasury of Irish Love( Hippocrene Books, New York.) Recent volumes of poems in Irish are Syojo (Clo Iar-Chonnachta) and Eachtrai Krishnamurphy (Coisceim). A forthcoming volume of poems in English, Uttering Her Name, consists of love poems in the classical tradition of spiritual longing. A former Chairman of Poetry Ireland/ Eigse Eireann, he is a member of The World Haiku Club and an Hon. Life Member of the Irish Translators' and Interpreters' Association. He taught haiku at the Schule fur Dichtung (Academy of Poetry), Vienna in 2008. He has translated thousands of haiku and poems into Irish, including the selected poems of Heaney, Grass, Michele Ranchetti, Said, F X Alarcon, J W Hackett, Issa, Shiki, Buson, Santoka, John W. Sexton, Michael Augustin, Hansjorg Schertenleib, Peter Huchel, Georg Heym, Willem M. Roggeman, Andres Ehin, Zhang Ye, Georg Trakl, J P Tammen, Hilde Domin, Michael Kruger. Rosenstock has read his poetry and haiku in Ireland, Britain, North, South and Central America, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, Australia and India. He contributes a haiku column to the newspaper LA. A new Selected Poems/ Rogha Danta appeared in 2005 from Clo Iar-Chonnachta.