Stella Pierides

Great news about the project arranged by Alan Summers, Karen Hoy, and Bertel Martin in collaboration with the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. Haiku sent by a number of haiku poets (one of mine included), were matched with Japanese block prints and are now displayed on the Museum website. A big thank you to Alan and Karen, and congratulations to all poets who took part.

From the Museum website:

In autumn 2019, poets from around the world responded to a call for haiku, a form of short Japanese poetry, based on Japanese prints in the collection at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. People sent in more than 800 beautiful, thought-provoking poems from thirty countries worldwide. See the selection below.

Many poems were inspired by woodblock prints in our popular 2018-2019 exhibition series, Masters of Japanese Prints.

The project was arranged by haiku poets Alan Summers and Karen Hoy of creative writing consultancy Call of the Page. The call for poems was linked with a haiku workshop delivered at the museum with writer and producer Bertel Martin of City Chameleon.

Huge thanks to Alan, Karen and Bertel as well as to all the poets who took part. You are bringing the world together through poetry.

Issue 2 of MacQueen’s Quinterly is out and I am delighted to have a haibun triptych included! Many thanks to editor Clare MacQueen! Read “Noir” here and below:

Noir [A Triptych]

Snow white

A small room, white walls, white lino floor. Sheets like snow. Her deep breathing. Hair the color of frost. Beads of sweat on her forehead, in the folds of her neck. She is dreaming.

crow’s call
a night unlike
any other

and her life

A small room. Unmade bed, a chair toppled over. Two plastic cups on the floor. Walls of indistinct colour. The Book of Sand open at the foot of the bed.

no one here
lives like a princess—
mushy peas for tea

as it might have been

A room 5’x5′. No curtains. Aretha Franklin’s “I say a Little Prayer” from the room next door. Birds. On the pavement outside her window, fag ends and chewing gum.

diaphanous—
lives of others in frequencies
I can hear