•Tom has felt equally blessed and grateful to read and try to write haiku and related forms for
over a decade. He is a member of the Rt. 9 Haiku Group along with John Stevenson, Hilary Tann and Yu Chang. Twice a year
they publish Dim Sum, a collection of their poems and those of a featured guest poet. Here is a link to the group
web site:
CHAPBOOKS
Tom's first two chapbooks: Autumn Wind in the Cracks ©1994 and Unraked Leaves ©1995, both received third-place recognition
in the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Awards for those years. He also published Standing Here, in 1998. These
three chapbooks and his first collection of tanka, A Work of Love, 1995, are all out of print but posted here in their
entirety. His latest collection is ‘being there’ ’©2005 Swamp Press.
Tom has a collection of haiku, senryu and tanka published by Snapshot Press entitled: Homework, detailing in poems
the trials and tribulations of family life.
also published by Snapshot Press and available to order is a tanka collection, "Growing
Late"
POETIC PERSPECTIVE
Tom views haiku as the essence of relation-ship to what is poetry and perspective.
Here is further expression of his feelings for haiku:
"Haiku has consistently appealed to me as a means of centering, focusing,
sharing, and responding to this life and
a world bent on excess. As the layers of my own life have accumulated, I’ve often felt overwhelmed by both
personal
changes and the mass of news, information, and survival
requirements that come with being human. Haiku offer a way to honor
and celebrate simple yet profound relationships, that can awaken in us, with a silent inner touch, spiritual relevance that
adds meaning to our lives".
TANKA ONLINE
Tom is part of a group that features their tanka along with essays about writing tanka. This site also features
wonderful guest poets and a meaningful gallery of tanka:
At this home page are samples of my writing; mostly haiku, senryu and tanka. Please click on the various links
to see the contents of some of my earlier chapbooks and ordering information for more recent chapbooks that are still available.
I began work on this site in December 2005 with encouragement and help of my friend, Doug Willmot. It has become a repository
for poems and links to personal interests that I hope may be of interest.
