I got round to reading this last week. My favourites are a couple that seem just a little cynical.

Clouds -
a chance to dodge
moon-viewing.

&

How pleasant -
just once not to see
Fuji through mist. ( )

Bashō was a Japanese poet from the late 1600s. This is a Penguin 60s edition (about 3 ½” wide by 4 ½” high and 60 pages long). The poems are all quite and precise, lyrical, melancholy, and sometimes sexy. Many of the themes are about nature or travel and small observations. The translation seems to favor expressing the precision of the language and mood over maintaining the haiku format perfectly. A few which were particularly nice:

Wake, butterfly –
it's late, we’ve miles
to go together.

Violets –
how precious on
a mountain path.

Girl cat, so
thin on love
and barley.

Such fragrance –
from where,
which tree?

From the heart
of the sweet peony,
a drunken bee. ( )

This miniature book contains 60 haiku by Bashō, the seventeenth-century writer who's often regarded as the greatest of all Japan's Zen poets.

This is a double-first for me, as it's not only my first one by Basho, but also my first haiku book in general. Sure, I'd read some haikus here and there, but always on the Internet and never on paper. I finished it in something like 10 minutes, but then returned to it and read some of the poems all over again, to better appreciate them. The imagery is just fantastic; there are predominantly themes of nature, but nature almost as an expression of the emotional world of the poet, and the inner dimension of a person in general. The book is quintessentially Japanese, with mentions of mount Fiji, Chuang Tzu, Buddha, sake, samurais and haikus, and many descriptions of beautiful cherry blossoms. I cannot begin to imagine how different these haikus are read in the original. Sadly, Japanese is not a language I speak and, though I particularly dislike any kind of poetry in translation, I had to make do. Luckily, the translation felt very natural and I enjoyed the haikus a great deal - some more than others, of course. I guess a complaint I have is that this collection was way too short, but then what would you expect from a 60page pocket-book?

"Another haiku?
yet more cherry blossoms -
not my face." ( )