Haiku poems about the natural world and the seasons are well known, but many poets have used the genre to capture the evocations of love.
Combining elegant and restrained haiku with lively senryū poems, all aspects of romantic love are explored here with humour, satire, wit and compassion. Poems by both men and women from the 1600s to the present day are beautifully illustrated with images from the unrivalled collection of Japanese prints and paintings in the British Museum. The majority of the poems come from the early seventeenth to mid nineteenth centuries and include works from the best-known Japanese classical authors, female poets and a number of contemporary writers. Nearly all are newly translated by Alan Cummings.
From the tender and melancholy to the witty and the ribald, the poems and images in Haiku: Love comment on the most universal of human emotions.
With 40 colour illustrations
