This book is dedicated

       to all those who have taught me and

       all those that I have been honored to teach;

       especially it is for the

       Madonna of the Roses

      Preface

      FOR ME THERE ARE NINE JOYS CONNECTED WITH THIS first book of haiku and sketches. The primary joy concerns my home and children. Without this environment to share, explore, discover, and grow in, there would have been no poems, no music, no circle.

      Secondly, without the editors of the haiku magazines in America and elsewhere, no book could have been written. So my deepest thanks go to Eric Amann and William J. Higginson of Haiku Magazine, Jean Calkins of the former Haiku Highlights, Leroy Kanterman of Haiku West, Kay Titus Mormino of Modern Haiku, Lorraine E. Harr of Dragonfly, Gerry Loose of Haiku Byways in England, Janice M. Bostok of Tweed in Australia, and to all others who have guided, scolded, corrected, and printed some of these haiku.

      A third joy is the opportunity to pay two men some great debts. To Harold Henderson must go the most since it is his guide and love song to Japan called Introduction to Haiku that nurtured my first fumbling efforts. And to R. H. Blyth's work goes thanks for the scholarship and the dedication and the knowledge he has passed down with such love and care.

      My fourth joy is in Nature herself. In this book and in all my own haiku, one attempts to learn from the vastness that is there. Like some backyard Thoreau, each of us can benefit from knowing one small place better and more thoroughly. For me, this place is our yard. Yet this yard also extends outward to my town, Pitman, my county, Gloucester, my state, New Jersey, my country the United States, my world, this earth. And since there is not any one point where that begins or ends, it is my circle, my joy in the endless search to tell its tales, its songs, and find its meanings no matter how skillfully or clumsily,