Brooks Books Haiku

The Clay Jar: Haiku, Senryu and Haibun Poems

The Clay Jar:
Haiku, Senryu and Haibun Poems

by Caroline Giles Banks

Caroline Giles Banks. The Clay Jar: Haiku, Senryu and Haibun Poems. Wellington-Giles Press (Minneapolis, MN) © 2013. Perfectbound, (5.5" X 8.5") 84 pages. $12 plus $4 postage.

Part I of "The Clay Jar" includes haiku and senryu poems written over the past 25 years. Many of the poems were originally published in "frogpond," the journal of the Haiku Society of America, as well as in other nationally and internationally recognized journals, magazines and anthologies.

Part II includes haibun, a form of poetry which combines short prose and haiku. It is often used as a form of travel diary. The collected poems reflect the author's sense of irony and social conscience as she observes human relations and emotions, world events and the natural world. The poet's style aims for brevity, levity, a sense of immediacy and lightness.

ISBN: 978-0-9645254-4-3
$12.00 plus $4.00 postage

order from:

Wellington-Giles Press
4040 Sheridan Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55410

About the Author:

Caroline Giles Banks was born in Boston, Massachusetts. A graduate of Wellesley College, she earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Minnesota. Dr. Banks taught at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Her teaching and research interests include medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, cultural diversity, and the anthropology of poetics. Her academic research focuses on the cultural dimensions of anorexia nervosa. Articles on her research appear in "Social Science and Medicine," "Ethos," "Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought," "The Psychoanalytic Review," and other academic journals and books.

Caroline's poetry is often informed by her training and research in anthropology. She writes in several genres, including haiku and senryu forms. She is the author of "Warm Under the Cat: Haiku and Senryu Poems," "The Clock Chimes: Haiku and Senryu Poems" and "The Clay Jar: Haiku, Senryu and Haibun Poems." Caroline's haiku and senryu have received national awards and appear in many anthologies, literary magazines and journals.

She also writes ekphrastic poetry, poems in response to paintings, photographs, and sculpture. Her poetic memoir, "The Weight of Whiteness: A Memoir in Poetry," published by Wellington-Giles Press in 2012, consists of poems about her awareness of her 'whiteness' during the integration of Boston's public schools in the 1950s and responses to her interracial marriage in 1966, the year before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned as unconstitutional sixteen states' laws prohibiting miscegenation.

Caroline Giles Banks lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

senryu by Caroline G. Banks . . . attain that level of meaning and humorous satiric image found in a successful senryu.

R. W. Grandinetti Rader

Haiku and senryu on such topics as politics, social concerns, etc., are difficult to write
well . . . but Caroline Banks tenderly reveals her social consciousness, and tests ours, within the canons of haiku aesthetics.

Robert Spiess
Modern Haiku

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