John Brandi: The Rain Sweeps Through

John Brandi’s haiku practice spans four decades—a steadfast companion to his life as a poet, visual artist, and author of numerous books of poetry, travel essays, and haibun. The haiku collected in The Rain Sweeps Through are culled from wherever they first landed: pocket pad, a paper napkin, a daily journal, the palm of the author’s hand, or in notes accompanying his field sketches. As the author writes in a moving afterword, “[the haiku] world is timeless within one’s given time. There is always the vastness, that upside-down raven at play between the dust devils spinning across the mesa. There is always intimacy, that bead of sun moving on the back of the housefly on the windowsill. The haiku mind is tuned to both worlds, alert to what either might deliver.”