One Breath: Haiku Society of America
1995 Members’ Anthology

First published in Woodnotes #29, Summer 1996, page 48.

One Breath: Haiku Society of America 1995 Members’ Anthology edited by Jean Dubois, Michael McNierney, and Elizabeth L. Nichols. Haiku Society of America, 1996, 46 pages, paperback, 5 by 8 inches. $7.50 postpaid from Jean Dubois at P.O. Box 1430, Golden, Colorado 80402 [address no longer correct]. The annual HSA members’ anthologies have reached a new height in production values with the 1995 anthology, which features poems by 145 of its members, at a pace of usually three or four per page. Indeed, we do share our one-breath poems with one breath-the unifying breath of deep insight and shared feeling. The book is dedicated to Elizabeth Searle Lamb, dubbed by Raymond Roseliep as “America’s first lady of haiku,” thus I quote her poem as a sample, along with Lidia Rozmus’s title poem:

 

tossing a stone

down an old mine shaft—

the setting sun

 

      one breath

one brush stroke

            one