Haiku: This Other World

This volume reproduces Wright's own selection of 817 of these short, imagistic poems, most previously unpublished.

A dazzling collection of 810 haiku, the rigorous 17-syllable Japanese poem, by the famed author of Native Sonand Black Boy. Burning out its time,/ And timing its own burning/ One lonely candle. Richard Wright, one of the early forceful and eloquent spokesmen for black Americans, author of Native Son and Black Boy, was also, it turns out, a major poet. During the last eighteen months of his life, he discovered and became enamored of haiku, the strict seventeen-syllable Japanese form. Wright became so excited about the discovery that he began writing his own haiku, in which he attempted to capture, through his sensibility as an African American, the same Zen discipline and beauty in depicting man's relationship, not to his fellow man as he had in his fiction, but to nature and the natural world. In all, he wrote over 4,000 haiku, from which he chose, before he died, the 817 he preferred. Rather than a deviation from his self-appointed role as spokesman for black Americans of his time, Richard Wright's haiku, disciplined and steeped in beauty, are a culmination: not only do they give a added scope to his work but they bring to it a universality that transcends both race and color without ever denying them.