Hello, welcome, thank you for your visit.

I have to guess what has brought you here. Wanting to buy one of my books, perhaps? I should be so lucky! But we may come to that in a moment, first you might like some personal background.

I am known to a sparse but worldwide community of enthusiasts as a champion of the genres we call English haiku and English haibun. Of both I have indeed had an inordinate number published. I have also written quite a few essays, articles, reviews, and been part of numerous workshops, seminars, readings, as well as haiku presentations in schools and colleges. Do I think of myself as an éminence grise? No, rather a partially informed Japonist, who adds to his native cultural heritage some inspirations from the artistic ethos of an exotic land and people, and who tries to indigenise some of their principles and practice without descending into pastiche.

So I write haiku in both the supposedly prescribed 17 syllables, but mainly in free verse form (working to the Blundellian Axiom, ‘chuck it out the window and see if it will fly.’) My rule of thumb is to use the minimum words needed to reveal the effect (or surprise) latent in some thing or event that catches my eye (or other sense.)

Michael McClintock, one of the foremost American critics, has this to say about my style:

“gentle, melancholy, ruminative aspects make his poems distinctive among contemporary English-language haiku”

“they bring order out of memory”

“among all the haiku poets who flourish today in Britain, (he is) one of the least Eastern-inflected and most independent of Japanese influences”

“a leader in the evolution of the migration into haiku of the values of senryu”

Since the mid-1990s I have been a pioneer in developing the English language haibun, an amalgamation of haiku and senryu with suitable prose.

If you have suffered this far without clicking me off, thank you so much for your patience!