by Kelly

This haiku review is a bit of a stretch, but if you stick it out, you’ll discover why it’s here.

The book, Sweet Misfortune by Kevin Alan Milne, isn’t about haiku. It’s a about a woman named Sophie who owns a chocolate shop.

Sophie is rather unlucky in love. After her most recent break up she decides to transform her bitterness into cookies. She makes a batch of fortune cookies but instead of penning reassuring good wishes for the future, she writes pessimistic notes like, “Yesterday was the high point in your life. Sorry.”

Sophie’s “misfortune cookies” turn out to be quite popular with her customers, but there is one man who doesn’t like them. He is the man who wants to win Sophie’s heart. Can he convince her that all her misfortune in love is behind her?

Sounds like a bona fide chic flick, doesn’t it? That’s probably why I fell so easily into the story, and why I just kept right on reading late into the night. This would have been a perfect beach/airplane read. Unfortunately in my case, it was the perfect I’m-sick-in-bed book. But being sick in bed wasn’t all bad. I did, after all, get to read a fun book.

And now here’s where I get to the haiku part. All the way at the end of Sweet Misfortune is the author’s acknowledgments page, which is written in haiku.

“I’m certainly no poet (as you’ll soon see), but putting my thoughts and feeling into this format was way more fun, and considerably less stressful, than crafting boring old sentences,” Mr. Milne wrote before going on to list several haiku about those who helped deliver this book from brainstorm to market. For example:

Sharp eyes reading quick:

Gram, Mom, Kacie, Becca, Jen –

Family with red pens.

And so, yet again, haiku makes a surprise appearance in my life. See, haiku is everywhere…

by Kelly

Sunday matinee

feels more romantic than a

date night Friday night

by Kelly

This slim book, Love Haiku:Masajo Suzuki’s Lifetime of Love, had me swooning like a ten year-old over the Jonas Brothers.

It was so heartbreaking, so romantic, so utterly touching. Oh! I’m so glad I found it.

I found it after reading Haiku Mind by Patricia Donegan. In that book, Donegan highlights individual haiku by various authors and pulls a life lesson from each. Donegan shared a love haiku written by Suzuki and that one tiny three-line poem was enough to send me out into the Internet seeking an entire book of Suzuki’s work.

Suzuki is a contempoaray Japanese haiku poet. Passion fules her haiku. Once I learned her life story, it was easy to understand why.

Suzuki married a man and had a daughter. But then her husband disappeared. Just up and disappeared. He was never seen or heard from again.

Then, her sister died, leaving behind a husband and four children. Because Suzuki was without a husband, she was married off to her sister’s widower and was expected to help raise her sister’s kids.

Suzuki didn’t love her second husband, but out of a sense of duty she moved in with him and worked at his hotel.

While working at the hotel, she met a third man, fell madly in love and started an affair with him that would consume the rest of her life. Even though this third man was married, she ran away from her husband, his hotel and her sister’s kids in order to be his mistress.

This book is a collection of Suzuki’s haiku translated from Japanese. The 150 haiku in this book all relate in some way back to her complicated love life and were selected from Suzuki’s seven published books of haiku.

Here is one that I really liked:

longing for love –

I place a single strawberry

in my mouth

And another:

field of violets –

like those fallen from grace

like the two of us

And another:

my betrayed husband –

I wash his tombstone

with meticulous care

Find it on Amazon:Love Haiku : Masajo Suzuki’s Lifetime of Love