Description
witnessing life/ although just passing by/ as if forever
Take a quiet stroll through this diverse land of haiku, witnessing the kaleidoscopic life expressed in these “essence” poems, only three lines but full of deep observation and emotion: wonder, melancholy, confusion, hope. Meet the butterflies, the raindrops, the cherry blossoms, the yearning heart, the awakened eye. The bounty of images here are to be entered slowly, one at a time. As you experience each moment the author has noticed and scribed on his poetic pilgrimage, perhaps you too will be inspired to pick up a pen and write haiku, to celebrate and mourn in turn the human condition, the beauty and sorrow, the sky, the sun, the cloud, the bird and cricket, the face in the mirror. — Katya Sabaroff Taylor, author, My Haiku Life
With many lines birthed in the land of its genesis, oblation to its celebrated master, and rich visuals of impressionistic scenery rendered into verse with the lightest of insights into facets of the human condition that always precede the social, without any “sick hurry” and with compassionate irony reflective of its true spirit, ‘rewarding’ is the word for this haiku collection. — Robin S Ngangom
Ibohal is a poet of images; his poetry has an unfailing visual impact… [his poems] often come in the form of scenes and images, often in his dreams…That may be the secret of the dreamy, dusky, revelatory quality of [his] poems. — K. Satchidanandan
Ibohal returns the haiku to its origins—the cherry blossom, the kimono-wearing girl, the monk and his lonely shadow, and the figure of Basho himself. But he goes further, making of the form a finely tuned instrument of his own modern loneliness as he moves between Japan, the Khasi Hills and Manipur. Altogether these verses show an extraordinary attentiveness to moments in nature and a sweet wryness in the face of pain. He achieves the haiku’s mysterious balance of capture and release by “witnessing life/although just passing by/as if forever”. — Anjum Hasan
ibohal kshetrimayum is the pen name of Ravikant Singh Kshetrimayum. Born in Imphal, Manipur, an eastern state of India on the Indo-Myanmar border, he now lives in a place called Mawpat, a woody hilltop neighbourhood in Shillong, Meghalaya, hunting metaphors hiding among fallen pine needles in Mawpat’s sacred pine groves after retiring as a senior project engineer in 2014 from the construction wing of the state sports council Meghalaya, of which he was a founding member. Author of the poetry book It No Longer Rains Like Before (2014), this is his first haiku collection.