I’ve known Annie Bachini since I first attended a British Haiku Society AGM at Daiwa House, in the mid-’90s, and admired her haiku before then. Annie, along with Alan Summers, was very friendly and welcoming, and dispelled my nervousness. Both were also very encouraging of my haiku writing.

Being a resident of inner-city London, Annie’s haiku are rare in how they often address urban themes. Annie’s oeuvre also contains many fine haiku concerning the fault-lines of relationships.

Three years ago, Annie asked me if I would be one of what turned out to be four poets – the others were Dee Evetts, Steve Mason and Dick Pettit – to look at the draft of a manuscript which ended up being accepted for publication by Iron Press, though as a dual-collection with another fine, longstanding British haiku poet, Helen Buckingham.

Here are a couple of Annie’s haiku in the book which I especially like:

faint breeze rolling a scrunched paper bag

waiting room
the rhythmic squeaks
of the cleaner’s shoes

The one-liner is a concrete haiku of sorts, in that the bag is rolled horizontally with the text. What I especially like about it, though, are that the word ‘rolling’ is used transitively, rather than the much more common intransitively, and that the movement is engendered by a faint breeze. Yes, it’s a fairly straightforward ‘cause-and-effect’ poem, but it’s subtly done. The highlighting of an item of litter may or may not be seen as an incidental comment on today’s selfish society. And which reader wouldn’t enjoy the sound of that ‘scrunched’? The way in which the wind is interacting with a thrown-away item reminds me of that strangely captivating scene in American Beauty in which the camera follows a plastic bag through the air. The haiku is very neatly done.

The three-liner is equally fine, not least in how it makes art out of what, in lesser hands, could be a mundane observation. The waiting room might be at the doctor’s, dentist, train station or wherever – though probably one of the first two – but it’s the attentiveness of the second element of the poem which beautifully commands the reader’s attention. It’s an exemplar of how a well-chosen adjective can add so much: as well as providing visual and sonic balance, ‘rhythmic’ implies so much. The cleaner, it seems, is doing a thoroughly professional job, as perhaps they’ve been shown how to do. We might intuit, too, that the cleaner is taking pride in their work, but earns very considerably less than the professional in the consulting room. That it’s the shoes which the poet draws our eyes and ears towards makes this, for me, a real masterpiece.

The book, rather prosaically entitled Two Haiku Poets, is available from Iron here.