Clay Moon

Thomas Powell

Clay Moon

Paperback
96 pages
198 mm x 129 mm / 7¾" x 5⅛"
ISBN 978-1-903543-48-1

Praise for Clay Moon

‘The images in Thomas Powell’s Clay Moon are vivid with light and texture, his haiku charged with reality. This seamless collection inspires from start to finish and beyond.’
—Ferris Gilli
Consulting Editor, The Heron’s Nest

‘Thomas Powell is an acute observer of the natural world, quietly noting the passage of time and the changing seasons. All his senses are engaged in the process. Within this wider canvas, he also celebrates his life as a potter. His use of poetic technique is unobtrusive but wide-ranging, creating haiku with real depth and musicality.’
—Ian Storr
Editor, Presence

‘Like his compatriot englyn poets, Thomas Powell uses a short poetic form—the haiku—to celebrate the world around him: the rural landscapes of his adopted Northern Ireland. Powell’s clear-minded vision and linguistic gifts inform haiku which show nature in all its rich and spare details: its fields, woodlands and waters; trees, plants and their fruits; and, especially, birds; calling, singing, diving, migrating, doing everything they must to survive in all weathers.

That sense of the fragility of existence, firmly in the haiku tradition, is mirrored by Powell’s own economic survival, threaded as a ‘sub-plot’ through Clay Moon, as a potter, facing redundancy and wrestling with the anxiety of job-hunting and economic uncertainty, before he takes the bold step into a different unknown, of self-employment. That narrative lends an added, poignant element to the coherence of his haiku, beyond the usual seasonal sequencing.

As well-formed as the most perfect of pots, this outstanding first full collection of Powell’s beautiful, haunting haiku confirms his place among the very best English-language haiku poets writing today.’
—Matthew Paul

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Haiku


quiet winter dawn
a gate starts clanking
to a ewe’s itch


last day in work . . .
the bowl’s throwing lines
smoothed away


old forest path
one thrush’s song
becomes another’s


spring sun skimming the lough with a stone


a day to myself . . .
I follow the river
back to its source

Reviews

‘A stunning book.’
Frogpond, Journal of the Haiku Society of America