It’s a great pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Judy Kendall. We met many years ago through our membership of the Yorkshire/Lancashire Haiku group. Judy lived and worked in Japan for nearly seven years. Cinnamon Press published four collections – containing haiku and ‘mainstream’ poems. You can read Judy’s full biography further down. I’ll post a second selection of Judy’s writing next month.

Haiku published in Presence

shades of blue distance in the fells

afternoon off 
red grouse in flight 
almost grazing the heather

moorland air
just after a curlew’s call
liquid fresh—

travelling light
I will my neighbor
to turn the page

(published in Presence and selected for Red Moon Best English Language anthology)

Short poems or ‘vegetable’ haiku published in insatiable carrot (Cinnamon Press, 2015)

[Many of these have featured on Incredible Edible Todmorden’s Edible Poetry site and on or around the town]

tall green mild and meek
not quite the full onion
the gentle leek

hairy bitter cress
going wild
among
the cabbages

snug by the wall
the one the pennine wind forgot
Todmorden’s first apricot

taken apart, the cabbage
becomes all heart
and leaves

chunky, nobbly-eyed
the potato says ‘hi,
will you be my friend?’

Haiku and poems from Joy Change (Cinnamon Press, 2010)
Haiku:

wooden geta
the water quivers with carp
a horizon of lilies

sickle moon, yellow
and black, on my way
back to the heart

(still international haiku competition)

watching the breath come
and go, who am I but
a broken bit of star?

(still international haiku competition)

drifting
mountains shoulder the sky
blotches of pine

(Asahi Shimbun)

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 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).