Shizu Oka - The Silent Hills In Travail

A natural tendency away from sheer "nature" poems and toward "human-nature" poems became apparent in my first didactical-work "Shizu Oka: The Silent Hills". This second volume of "single-breath: haiku" poems focuses more on this dramatic-aspect of reality (in human-mortality and in nature - viz. the natural-world), while continuing to build NZ-Kigo lists and classifications. The sheer power and magnificence of Natural-Forces has always fascinated mankind, filling souls with wonder, awe, and inspiration - This is why the "humanities", wisdom and "travail", are of necessity inseparable from even the purest Nature-Poem. The "purist" invariably believes "a fiction", not having the "feet on the ground" so to speak, and this is the essence of "kireji: cutting-words", to fathom and plumb the depths of life, romance, poesy, suffering, death, inspiration, redemption, salvation, the essence of each moment of mortal-living - "For we know that every creature groaneth and travaileth in pain, even till now (Rom.8: 22)"!