Carvings on Dew: An Offering of Haiku and Haibun

By Vidur Jyoti

haiku, carvings on dew and you
I write because creativity is the bridge that I want to traverse from creation to the creator, was my answer when quizzed as to why do I write.
There was a turning in this journey from where on haiku and its related genres became my chisel and hammer to carve out that creativity and dew was the medium I found myself to be working on. Walking barefoot on grass or just gazing at blooms and buds at times while waiting for the sun to shine its rays on those pearls would make me reach out to myself and start carving my experience on them in the form of these writings.
This collection of my haiku poems and the haibun and some haiga presented to you in this book are not only to share the ecstasy of that experience but the entire process of experiencing an experience itself.
Haiku is a semicircle drawn by the poet and completed by the reader, a comment by one of the accomplished haiku poets of repute precisely elucidates the intricacy of haiku reading and writing. These carvings on dew are attempt to present that semicircle to you with a hope and wish that you draw the rest of it to enjoy the manifestation of a full circle around a central experience which like the centre in a geometrical circle is the truth of the haiku and that of the entire creativity too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Oct 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781482855524

Vidur Jyoti

A surgeon by training, Dr Vidur Jyoti has lived the opportunity provided by his profession to experience Life in totality as it unfolds to him in the form of an interaction with the suffering and the smiling. Acquaintance with the physical lead him to search the metaphysical, knowledge of the mundane provided the impetus to search the wisdom of the transcendental, seeing the picture goaded him to seek a vision of the canvas. Medical training lead him to literature in the pursuit of his quest to savour the ultimate experience of oneness which the creation and creativity reveal by themselves through all that gets created irrespective of the form or duration of that revelation. He has expressed his quest and the resultant experiences in the form of prose and poetry with equal élan. His writings have been anthologised widely and translated too. He lives in Gurgaon, India where he is engaged in his practice of Surgery besides pursuing his interest in photography, philosophy and Vedanta.

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Copyright © 2015 by Vidur Jyoti.

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Prologue

Haiku

Haiku Sequences

Renhai

Haibun

Endnotes

FOREWORD

Susumu Takiguchi

In every nation where haiku is practiced, there is bound to be at least one poet who, perhaps not in the limelight, would become a major influence, in the shape of an "En-no-shita-no-chikaramochi" (or unsung hero). We will not know how many of them exist in a given country for they are by definition not so well-known. By contrast, there are sickeningly too many heroes and heroines everywhere both in terms of a single country or the world haiku community as a whole, who jostle for position and fame, pushing themselves in the centre stage with loud mouth and self-imposed air of authority.

When I visited India for WHC’s World Haiku Festival in 2008, I met a gentleman who I thought could become neither "En-no-shita-no-chikaramochi", nor a self-serving hero but a genuine leader in the development of haiku in that vast nation of rich history, creativity, linguistic variety and above all the fecundity of literary heritage. That gentleman, I am pleased to say, is the author of this new anthology.

Judging from the fact that Vidur Jyoti has begun to be recognised and that there has been an increasing number of those who admire his haiku poems in spite of his self-effacing nature, you would be forgiven to think that he is well on the way to becoming precisely the personality just described. Now that his selected haiku and haibun have come together in a new book, carvings on dew, it is possible for his fans and new and wider audience across the world to appreciate closely what he has to offer. I wish I could show the reader some of examples here of what I think would show his excellence. This is for the simple reason that they are just too many to quote. Instead, I should like to release the reader from tiresome comments and invite him/her to go straight to the contents and start enjoying each and every poem and haibun.

Two points, though,