Haiku Guy reviews
Critical Praise for Haiku Guy
"When the Novel Met Haiku"—a review by Petar Tchouhov
"Takes us on a literary journey to Old Japan and contemporary New Orleans that transcends the limits of time and space ..."
—Randy M. Brooks, Xavier Review
"Set in a wind-blown, temporary world where time and lastingness are without meaning and one breath is the duration of human wisdom."
—Michael McClintock, Modern Haiku
"Darts back and forth between present day and centuries ago, in a mystical, funny, stand-up comic Flaubert way ..."
—Ralph Haselmann Jr., Exquisite Corpse
"The best textbook about writing haiku is a novel."
—Robert Hudson, Working Poet
"I enjoyed his lyrical muse...would recommend 'Haiku Guy' to all who write poetry, and to those who want to understand those poets."
—Judine Bishop Slaughter, Small Press Review
Readers' Comments
"So you're getting ready for summer vacation and looking for a wonderfully fun and illuminating novel to toss in your carry-on. What's that? Did you say you're also intending to write a little travel haiku? Good for you! All you need are a blank notebook, a pen (nothing fancy—a blue Bic will work just fine) and Haiku Guy, a novel by haiku poet David G. Lanoue."
—Connie Post
"It's a pleasure to finally read a work by a 'haiku scholar', if that term is not completely oxymoronic, that is imaginative and funny, literary yet spontaneous, and even sprinkled with profundity in its approach to the workings of the human mind and the guiding aesthetic behind it. Unique and irreverent, fanciful didacticism."
—Zolo
The story advances with shifts of place and time, surrealistic in a Western sense but more mystical in an Eastern one. Romantic relationships provide some additional interest. Like the haiku, about which readers learn so much, the novel with its many intersections has revelations of its own."
—Thomas Bonner, Jr.
"There is so much to say about this book—its multidimensions ... the interplay of the writer with the characters, and with the reader; just WHO the writer is—writer, student, mentor, seeker, guide; the incarnations of the characters; the shifting time frames with theme preserved throughout; the part the reader takes on quite inadvertently just because s/he is reading it ... it's wonderful."
—Naya
"Haiku Guy is the first novel to introduce haku writing in novelistic form. To some extent, I find Haiku Guy analogous to The Canterbury Tales, an account of a journey made by different characters until they reach their destination to pay homage to Thomas à Becket. In the same way, David's characters, too, persistently move in their quest in the haiku writing. The omniscient narrator beautifully tells the story, blending the cultural paradigms of the East and West with the help of life-like characters."
—Bam Dev Sharma
Haiku Guy received a "Special Category Honorable Mention for Haiku Novel" from the Haiku Society of America: Merit Book Awards 2000.
about the book Also by David G. Lanoue...Kobayashi Issa Archive