It’s a great pleasure introducing our November guest poet Ian Storr. We first met over 30 years ago through the Lancashire/Yorkshire branch of the British Haiku Society.

Ian has chosen a dozen haiku from his new collection Late Light with Alba Publishing. Ian’s biography and a link to a previous post follow.

moorland valley
a ring ouzel sings
from his blaze of white

streets named after
the mill owner’s daughters
first spots of rain

laburnum lilac lavender the buzz of bees into evening

midsummer morning
a fox slips through railings
into long grass

stony summit:
across the firth through haze
another England

sanderlings their legs longer on the wet beach

harvest moon
the purr of a frog
in the boundary wall

shorter days
red admirals quiver
where the wild plums split

Bonfire Night
the children with sparklers
spell out their names

early dusk
the crowns of the oaks
thicken with rooks

frost patterns
the parked cars roofs
solstice night

a whiff of sheep feed
from a stone wall’s foot
. . . the drifting snow

Biography

Ian Storr has a history degree from Oxford University and is a qualified social worker, now retired. His haiku have appeared in British and overseas journals and included in British and international anthologies. Many have won awards. He has one previous haiku collection, self-published, and he has co-authored a cross-disciplinary celebration of the British coast, through science, haiku and glass, which was published by the British Haiku Society. For eleven years he edited Presence, a leading journal in the field of English language haiku. He lives in Sheffield.

More an ache than an a sorrow – haiku