Japanese Death Poems
by Yoel Hoffmann | 
In the Eyes of the Cat
by Tze-Si Huang | 
Book of Haikus
by Jack Kerouac | 
Wing Nuts: Screwy Haiku
by Paul B. Janeczko | 
Narrow Road to the Interior
by Matsuo Basho | 
The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches
by Matsuo Basho |
The Cuckoo's Haiku
by Michael J. Rosen |
GUYKU
by Bob Raczka | 
The Far Field
by Theodore Roethke | 
Garbage
by A. R. Ammons | 
Lighthead
by Terrance Hayes | 
The Bridge
by Hart Crane | 
Actual Air
by David Berman | 
Spring and All
by William Carlos Williams | 
Words Under the Words
by Naomi Shihab Nye | 
Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov | 
Howl and Other Poems
by Allen Ginsberg | 
Metamorphoses
by Ovid | 
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
by Emily Dickinson | 
The Collected Poems
by Sylvia Plath |
Basho, one of the greatest of Japanese poets and the master of haiku, was also a Buddhist monk and a life-long traveller. His poems combine 'karumi', or lightness of touch, with the Zen ideal of oneness with creation. Each poem evokes the natural world - the cherry blossom, the leaping frog, the summer moon or the winter snow - suggesting the smallness of human life in comparison to the vastness and drama of nature. Basho himself enjoyed solitude and a life free from possessions, and his haiku are the work of an observant eye and a meditative mind, uncluttered by materialism and alive to the beauty of the world around him.