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Eating Sour Rhubarb Beneath A Cold Moon: A Book of American Haiku

by Joy Shieman, PTR

178 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); poetry; catalogue #06-0246; ISBN 1-4120-8492-x; US$24.95, C$28.69, EUR19.45, £12.90

- Unique American Haiku book: many "Firsts"
- Refined, aware, "Moments of Now"
-"High-Ku" captured from private aircraft
- Rules offered: become Haiku READER / WRITER
- Proven HEALER - Mental Health Settings

About the Book

A unique American Haiku book, filled with "firsts": 150 refined and aware "Moments of Now", many observed from a private aircraft. These produced as captured "High-ku" patterns from among the clouds. A Stanford University professor once declared,: "Joy has eagle eyes that distinguish the important from the insignificant."

Written in travel- form by a Haijen, they offer lyrical- digital word pictures of Canada, Mexico, America, plus paths in beloved Ireland. Professor Makoto Ueda wrote: "Basho's journals always make us want to visit the places he visited. This book seems to do the same."

As a "first", this book offers helpful and necessary suggestions- how to become not only a Haiku WRITER, but also a Haiku READER, and if capable, how to self-train to USE Haiku as a HEALER. It has been proven by many this cameo of BALANCE can become a finely-honed tool for COPING.

The writer, now retired, believed to be the FIRST pioneer to use Haiku as a HEALER WITH PATIENTS, commenced this approach over three decades ago within a Mental Health Setting. This required extreme patience with patient- and staff in a Psychiatric setting of a California Hospital.

Since then, Haiku used as a keen instrument has been tested by qualified persons with important results. This book offers samples of Haiku that have healed.

Patient- Haiku is never judged for technique, nor its lack of full rules: rather, ALL Haiku are accepted as previously hidden doorways into a garden of balance. Early in the author's research, healing Haiku was daringly introduced to San Quentin inmates. Surprising acceptance and release of emotions were evident in this toughest of scenes.

The author, along with other therapists, has used Haiku and varied Poetry Therapy tools as white paper islands of balance and peace, tested in other places of confinement- hospices, hospitals, Half-Way Houses for drug abuse, with troubled teens in high schools, with the blind, with "divorced children", divorced adults, in ministries, and most tenderly used with new mothers of babes lost at birth.

About the Author

Canadian born Joy Conron Shieman, Poetry Therapist, has been writing poetry for self-balance and for others since childhood. She married a newly graduated Medical student and they decided to make California their home. Their treasures on earth became their three creative daughters.

This explorer, with a detective tendency was destined to become a pioneer of the art of organizing poetry into healing patterns. Poetry Therapy's gentle action, serendipitously discovered, Joy originally termed "Therapoetics". She planted its roots in the Mental Health, Psychiatric Unit of a local hospital.

Now retired, she was among the first four persons to become a Registered Poetry Therapist and still is linking her heart and soul to this refined re-aligning instrument. Through the years it has been her pleasure to present on seventy occasions either workshops, or to take part in educational or medical panels.

As a co-author of "Borrowed Water" (Tuttle, 1966) the first anthology of American Haiku outside of Japan, immediately after its publication she realized Haiku’s potential as a "balancer", or "an island of order" for mal-aligned patients.

The Haiku harvest contained in "Eating Sour Rhubarb" was highly influenced by her husband, "Dr. Bryan" a pilot and eventually an Orthopedic Surgeon. He quietly became a one-man "Flying Doctor" finding those in need of "medical repair" during their travel adventures. It was on these flights Joy was gifted with viewing "High-Ku" from magic-carpet heights.

They both fell in love with Baja and Mexico and the loving people encountered, and often medically cared-for. Joy's life-journey writing poetry and learning to "Live Haiku" has provided many of the Haiku "Moments of Now", and some of the photos in "Eating Sour Rhubarb". This poet hopes that her book will bring either pleasure, adventure, healing, or as "Rumi" declared, "One small drop of knowing in my soul" to each reader.

Excerpts