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Chris Arthur, Irish Haiku
A PenMark Press Book
Irish Haiku
features the literate and thoughtful prose of one of Ireland’s
critically acclaimed writers, the award-winning poet and essayist,
Chris Arthur. Arthur’s writing blends the intensely personal with
the abstractly philosophical in his explorations of the meaning of
what happens, what has happened, and what may happen. His writing
has been compared favorably with figures as diverse as Hubert
Butler, Joseph Campbell, Seamus Heaney, C.S. Lewis and V. S. Naipaul.
As he has done in previous
collections, Irish Nocturnes (1999) and
Irish Willow
(2002), in Irish Haiku Chris Arthur explores the world as it
unfolds to his senses. As Arthur listens, touches, watches, tastes,
and thinks about his world we are invited to join him in his
historical, cultural, natural, philosophical, scientific, sometimes
humorous, and always thoughtful ruminations. You may read a
representative essay by clicking on the feather.
(Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader™)
Contents
Beginning by Blackbird
Obelisk
Safety and Numbers
Miracles
What Did You Say?
How to See a Horse
Getting Fit
Witness
Water-Glass
Malcolm Unravelled
Swan Song
Afterword
Critical acclaim for Chris Arthur’s
third essay collection, Irish Haiku:
“[O]nce more a demanding and rewarding
intellectual performance...Arthur’s musings embrace a range of
attitudes and questions. His is a post-religious consciousness and
there are moments here when Matthew Arnold or George Eliot, or even
the early Yeats come to mind...Hubert Butler is his nearest kin in
the field of Irish writing...Arthur’s capacious and lucid
intelligence is matched by his ceaseless wrestling with the
‘landmass’ of language to shed light where received ideas and
expressions have conspired to conceal it.”
Denis Sampson,
Canadian Journal of Irish Studies
“As a historical commentator, lyrical
ecologist, and prodigal son of Ulster, Chris Arthur is a most
illuminating guide to an Ireland of metaphor and metaphysics, a
landscape that might easily be missed by those just looking for the
fissures and the craic.”
Naomi Foyle,
Fortnight
“Chris Arthur’s essays belong to the
central tradition of the essay in that they are at once intensely
personal, meditative and engaged with the dynamics of their own
world – in Arthur’s case, the milieu of Ulster and the fabric of its
connections with the past and the present...[His essays] are elegant
and stylish explorations that change direction, that should be read
and re-read like haiku, that are virtually impossible to
summarise and that take us, through a profound sense of the
ordinary, into a world of loss and longings.”
Bryan Coleborne,
The Australian Journal of Irish Studies
“Arthur compares the essay form with
that of the haiku. But just as haiku, despite their brevity, cannot
be consumed like popcorn, these essays are best read slowly,
contemplatively. The reader will here discover worlds in a drop of
water as well as enchanting natural connections...Chris Arthur tells
us he originally believed he would be a poet, but turned to the
essay instead. Clearly, though, he has taken more than a few of the
poet’s instincts and skills with him into the genre, further
enhancing the pleasure of accompanying him on his tour of some
Northern Irish places.”
Thomas E. Kennedy,
The Literary Review
Author
Chris Arthur was born in Belfast and
lived for many years in County Antrim. He worked as warden on a
nature reserve on the shores of Lough Neagh before enrolling at the
University of Edinburgh where he took a First Class Honours degree
followed by a PhD. He has been widely published as an essayist and
poet on both sides of the Atlantic. His work has appeared in
The
American Scholar, The Antigonish Review,
The
Centennial Review, Contemporary Review, Dalhousie Review, Descant,
Event, The Honest Ulsterman, The North American Review, Northwest
Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Southern Review, The Threepenny
Review, The Wascana Review and others. His first essay
collection, Irish
Nocturnes, was published in
1999; his second collection,
Irish Willow,
was published in 2002.
Chris
Arthur was Gifford Fellow
at the University of St. Andrews and is a winner of the Akegarasu
Haya International Essay Prize, the Beverly Hayne Memorial Award for
Young Writers, and the Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award. He teaches
at the University of Wales, Lampeter.
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