Flower, Moon, Snow: A Book of Haiku

Tulips bring you a cupful of spring, shadows dance in the summer moonlight, jack-o’-lanterns grin in the autumn darkness, and snowflowers blossom on winter branches in these eloquently simple haiku poems that celebrate the beauty of nature in the year’s round of seasons.

Kazue Mizumura, Japanese-born American author and artist, has written thirty haiku in language so lucid and direct that the youngest child can read and respond to them. Yet these brief poems are classic in both form and content, and full of subtle pleasures for older readers, too. Ms. Mizumura has illustrated them sensitively with woodcuts in the traditional manner, printed in soft, understated colors. Together, words and pictures create a paean of praise to the joys to be found in garden, meadow, woodland, and one’s own backyard. The author has added an informative note about the special characteristics of haiku poems. Here is a fine introduction to a favorite art form of another country. Both the poems and the illustrations are quintessentially Japanese, but they are — like nature itself — also completely universal in their appeal.