Award

 Rejoice! … Our most recent book, One Hundred Poets on Mount Ogura, One Poem Each (published jointly in 2010 by Hailstone Haiku Circle and People Together for Mount Ogura), has just been awarded the 2011 Kanterman Merit Prize for Best Anthology by the Haiku Society of America (to my knowledge, the oldest English-language haiku association in the world).  Good news, methinks! http://www.hsa-haiku.org/meritbookawards/merit-book_archive.htm The chief judge this year was Michael Dylan Welch. For your interest, then, here is the bulk of the announcement list:

Merit Book Awards for 2011 (for books published in 2010) 

Best Individual Collections

First Place
Tenzing Karma Wangchuk. Shelter/Street. Port Townsend, Washington, 2010.

Second Place
John Parsons. Overhead Whistling. Bungay, UK: Labyrinth Press, 2010.

Third Place
Christopher Herold. Inside Out. Winchester, Virginia: Red Moon Press, 2010.

Best Anthology

Stephen Henry Gill and Okiharu Maeda, editors. One Hundred Poets on Mount Ogura, One Poem Each. Kyoto, Japan: People Together for Mt. Ogura and Hailstone Haiku Circle, 2010.

Best Book of Haibun

Cor van den Heuvel. A Boy’s Seasons. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Single Island Press, 2010.

Best Book of Translation

Ruth Franke, translated by David Cobb and Celia Brown, paintings by Reinhard Stangl. Schwerelos Gleiten/Slipping Through Water. Schwinfurt, Germany: Wiesenburg Verlag, 2010.

Some of you may remember Individual Collection Second Place awardee, John Parsons, for his Kikakuza International Haibun Contest Grand Prix masterpiece in 2009. You can read that work via the Kikakuza ’09 Winning Haibun page link at top right.

There are still a few copies of our anthology, One Hundred Poets on Mount Ogura, in stock here in Kyoto.  For enquiries/mail orders, see our Publications page (via link at top right). For those of you who don’t know it, it is bilingual (Eng.-Jap.) and includes a mixture of haiku and tanka, although the former predominate. It sings the praises and cries the shame of the famous mountain.

木洩れ日の 細き山道 鳥の声  町の暮らしを しばし忘れし

As light plays through trees
along the narrow mountain path,
the calls of birds:
.. for a while, I can forget
.. the city life I’ve left behind

…………… (Kazuyoshi Kohiyama)

Saigyo’s tears -
.. rammed down his well,
.. plastic pipes

…………… (John Dougill)

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