Book of the Week – A Wattle Seedpod by Lorin Ford

Lorin Ford’s A Wattle Seedpod opens the reader to an Australia seen through haiku eyes. Ford’s haiku rarely decorate nature; they listen to it. They find the sacred in rust, the eternal in dust, and the lyric in a magpie’s note. Like Bashō, she writes with humility before the world; like Janice Bostok, she roots haiku in the pulse of her homeland.

first light –
eye to dreaming eye
with a kookaburra

At dawn, human and bird meet gaze to gaze — the local kigo of the kookaburra replacing Japan’s bush warbler. 

heat shimmer
a kingfisher’s wings
answer the river

A mirage made musical. The wings “answer” the river, Ford’s summer shimmer transforms realism into reverie.

headstone
a leaf crosses out
the I in his name

A moment of accidental elegy. The leaf’s movement erases selfhood, returning “I” to the soil. Restraint, not sentiment, gives this poem its quiet ache. 

the rusted hooks
in Dad’s tackle box –
spring tide

Time’s twin forces: decay and renewal. The “rusted hooks” meet the surging tide, the personal and the eternal crossing like lines in water. Memory here is tidal — ebbing yet returning.

bon-bons
a wattle seedpod opens
with a pop

The title poem captures Ford’s signature balance of play and profundity. A Christmas bon-bon and a seedpod share the same joyful pop! — a small explosion of life, laughter, and renewal.

A Wattle Seedpod is a landmark in Australian haiku — not for its innovation alone, but for its authenticity. Ford does not borrow Japanese scenery; she translates its spirit into the idiom of her own landscape.

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You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library. Please share your favorite poem from the book with us.Do you have a full or chapbook length book published in 2020 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 Dan Campbell and are used with permission.

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