HaikuRichard WrightLabel: Skyhorse PublishingDescription: Richard Wright one of the early forceful and eloquent spokesmen for black Americans author of the acclaimed Native Son and Black Boy discovered the haiku in the last eighteen months of life. He attempted to capture through his sensibility as an African-American the elusive Zen discipline and beauty in depicting man's relationship not only to his fellow man as he had in the raw and forceful prose of his fiction but to the natural world. In all he wrote over 4000 haiku. Here are the 817 he personally chose; Wright's haiku disciplined and steeped in beauty display a universality that transcends both race and color without ever denying them. Wright wrote his haiku obsessively - in bed in cafes in restaurants in both Paris and the French countryside. They offered him a new form of expression and a new vision: with the threat of death constantly before him he found in them inspiration beauty and insights. Fighting illness and frequently bedridden deeply upset by the recent loss of his mother Ella Wright continued as his daughter notes in her introduction to spin these poems of light out of the gathering darkness.
