Tuesday Poem: Haiku "splitting pine" by Nick Williamson
splitting pine
I smell
the whole forest
.
(c) Nick Williamson
.
Published in The Whole Forest, Sudden Valley Press, 2001
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Haiku are an enormously popular contemporary poetry form, so much so that the NZ Poetry Society has a separate HaikuNZ page on its website, the only poetry form in NZ to receive such distinctive treatment. Perhaps, of the many poetic forms, it is the only one that has its own thriving organisational world–which haiku (and the related forms of tanka, haibun etc) definitely does.
But amidst the huge numbers of haiku being penned in NZ today, every now and then you read one that really stands out from the crowd and encapsulates the art: spare, without resorting to (the forbidden) imagery, simile or metaphor; "concrete", i.e. grounded in the reality of "the moment, now"; and leaping, from encapsulation of the small—that moment of splitting pine for firewood—to the "whole forest." Haiku, the way the form is meant to be (imho) …
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About Nick Williamson: Nick is a Christchurch-based poet who had a sabbatical from poetry following publication of The Whole Forest in 2001. He has recently completed the creative writing programme at The Hagley Writers' Institute and was a guest poet at last year's Canterbury Poets' Collective Autumn Reading Series, appearing with Michele Leggott and Helen Lowe (that's me, ok 
). Nick was Commended in the 2010 NZ Poetry Society International Poetry Comptition and Highly Commended in the Bravado Poetry Competition 2009. His work has appeared in a range of literary journals and anthologies.
