Book of the Week – balcony by Dimitar Anakiev

As I take on the role of Digital Librarian at The Haiku Foundation, following the careful and generous work of Dan Campbell and those who have shaped this space before me, I hope to continue the Book of the Week feature as a place of return. A place where older books are not archived into quietness, but revisited, reread, and allowed to speak again to new readers.

In the balcony, Dimitar Anakiev offers twenty-one one-line haiku that feel lived-in rather than arranged. Published by Red Moon Press in 2006, the book gathers moments from walking, waiting, smoking, shaving, reading, falling ill, loving, and from continuing to notice the world while doing all of that. The balcony of the title is not a metaphor to be solved. It is a place of standing, looking out, and not always being able to reach what is seen.

Many of the poems begin with ordinary acts and end by quietly shifting the ground under the reader.

thick fog I jump from stone to stone

The body moves carefully, guided by touch and memory rather than sight. The haiku holds risk and trust in a single breath, without turning either into drama.

Anakiev often allows public life to slip into the poem without commentary.

spring time in the state flag only three colors

Here, the season is filtered through politics and symbolism. Spring does not arrive as blossom or bird, but as limitation. What is missing speaks as clearly as what is shown.

Love appears in this book without ornament.

autumn rain from which you cannot escape: love

The line reads like an admission made too late to be revised. Love is not shelter. It is the weather itself.

Illness and mortality surface directly, without softening.

a tomcat, in human pose, dies

The identification is immediate and unsettling. The distance between animal and human collapses, leaving the reader to carry what remains.

Several poems work through small encounters that widen into something shared.

One of the haiku in balcony reads:

meeting a snail at the narrow path …

How would you complete this line, before reading Anakiev’s version?

The book ends without closure, returning the reader to the everyday world where boundaries are thinner than we pretend.

on both sides of the fence dandelions grow the same

What divides is shown as temporary and human-made. Growth does not consult it.

balcony is a compact book, but it carries a wide emotional and geographic range. These haiku do not explain themselves or seek reassurance. They stand where they are written from, attentive to what passes and what stays just out of reach.

You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library. Please share your favourite poem from the book with us.

Do you have a full or chapbook length book published in 2021 or earlier that you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details. Haiku featured in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by the THF Digital Librarian, Vidya Premkumar , and are used with permission.