•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:
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.
A new tanka collection, "Growing Late" also published by Snapshot Press, has just been released and is now available
to order.
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 a life and 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 these days. Haiku are for me a
means of honoring and celebrating simple yet profound relationships that
awaken in us, with a gentle and silent inner touch, a spiritual relevance
that adds meaning to our lives".
