Here is the second selection of poems by Judy Kendall, our June guest poet. She lived and worked in Japan for almost seven years. Cinnamon Press published four collections of her haiku and ‘mainstream’ poems. You can find her biography below her writing.

Poems:

The First Fountain Ever Placed In A Japanese Garden
for my mother

more than half
is the sound of it
as it splashes on the stone rim

this is the part
the thousands of photographs
will never reach

their takers stop
to make a frieze
and then move on

no chance of hearing
the other half
clapping its moving shadow in the trees

the shudder
when the leaves
follow the foam

which drops, unmoved
as if thrown by a boy
to fall through air

diluting
dissolving
into parts

Note:
The first fountain in a Japanese garden was built in Kenroku en, Kanazawa, in 1861

Driving To Noto

Men are better says Toshi I know
no they are not says I (I also know)
and so we argue to the tip of Noto

To Suzu where the wood huts slump in shock
plopped suddenly in frocks of snow
and the sea is whipped to icicles of frenzy

Over a nabe pot of fish and cabbage
(Toshi warns me not to call it cabbage
for it is the vastly superior hakusai)
our host asks me my age

Taken aback
(I`m older than he thought
more single), he inquires
don’t you like men?

So I assure him
only frequent country-moving
has prevented me from choosing
one of them

The returning road is white, wide as a field
the ditches spread themselves with frosting
and the windscreen blanks out like a blizzard

Toshi scrapes at the iced-up wipers singing
to himself, waving me in

Midwinter hangs in the boughs

The pine trees are bent nearly in two
laden with second helpings

(earlier version published in Ambit)

Short poem, haiku and tanka from The Drier The Brighter (Cinnamon Press, 2007):

Poem:

5 am

these cold skies
cheating the dawn,

these bits of tree,
blocks of houses too close to houses,
shrouded people, shrinking in the weather.

Haiku:

too much autumn
the reds are almost scorching now
a mouth brimming with leaves

tanka:

leaving.

not one stick of furniture
in the room.
in the heart,

no tears.

(previously published in Presence)

Biography:

Judy Kendall worked as an English lecturer at Kanazawa University in Japan for nearly seven years. When she first went to Japan she was a practicing playwright but she soon began to focus on poetry and haiku, kickstarted by an invitation to to participate in a collaborative translation of Miyaiki Eiko’s haiku. This became the bilingual publication Suiko /The Water Jar. Since then she has been writing haiku and haibun along with other poetic and prose forms. The haiku mode has informed her four Cinnamon Press poetry collections, particularly Joy Change – composed while she was in Japan. She has won several poetry awards, recently receiving a 2019 Genjuan International Haibun An Cottage prize, and is the essays and bilingual translations editor for Presence haiku journal. She has also run the Yorkshire/Lancashire haiku group.

She is Reader in English and Creative Writing at Salford University, and aside from haiku and haibun, works as a poet, poetry translator and visual text exponent. She has published several articles and books on the translation and creative process, including ‘Jo Ha Kyu and Fu Bi Xing; Reading|Viewing Haiku’ in Juxtapositions, 1 (2). She is currently putting the finishing touches to a monograph for Edinburgh University Press on Where Language Thickens (focusing on the threshold between articulation and inarticulation in language – a threshold in which haiku itself is surely situated).