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Haiku captures lyrical kaleidoscope of life
an old adobe
tall trees and running water
inside, wise poet
In the cozy living room of an old adobe house alongside Acequia Madre, beneath a rectangular window filled with branches stretching to the sky, sits a golden harp.
The harp is silent but the woman who opens the front door smiles, says hello and fills the room with music as she begins to talk about her long and lyrical life.
Elizabeth Searle Lamb, who was born in 1917 in Topeka, Kan., has always loved the sounds of beauty. An accomplished harpist, she also is one of the world's finest poets in the haiku genre as well as an esteemed haiku collector, historian and editor.
Lamb's work has earned more than 150 awards in the haiku field and has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, French, Polish and Spanish. Over the years, she has released six chapbooks of her haiku. La Alameda Press in Albuquerque recently published Lamb's first book, Across the Windharp: Collected & New Haiku.
"I'm delighted and grateful to the friends and family who kept nudging me to do it, especially Miriam Sagan, Bill Higginson and Penny Harter," Lamb said, sitting across from the harp as she talked about her new book.
Sagan, who edited Across the Windharp and penned the book's introduction; Higginson, who wrote the preface; and Harter are part of a group of Santa Fe poets who write haiku, an unrhymed verse form of Japanese origin.
Designed to capture a fleeting moment, haiku has three lines that alternate with five, seven and five syllables. In recent years, however, the English form is somewhat more...