For the Seasons: Haikus

For the Seasons: Haikus is a collection of rediscovered poetry by the late Beverley Farmer, showing her mastery of the haiku. The book is introduced by Lyn Jacobs.

Beverley Farmer is one of our finest prose writers, but her new book, For the Seasons: Haikus, is likely to make her reputation as a poet too. The manuscript of For the Seasons, composed over twenty-five years ago, was rediscovered by the critic and scholar Lyn Jacobs after Farmer’s death in 2018. The collection has never been published in full before. It joins the three prose works by Farmer Giramondo has now brought back into print: the novels Alone and The Seal Woman, and the journal A Body of Water.

The haikus collected in For the Seasons are arranged in sections, beginning with Spring then progressing to Summer and Autumn and ending with Winter.  One is immediately struck by the delicacy of Farmer’s observations, drawn from her immersion in the coastal landscape around Point Lonsdale on the Bellarine Peninsula in southern Victoria. The constraints imposed by the haiku form encourage attention to the finest details and textures – of light and colour, of air and sand and sea – and foster an awareness of the transient life they hold, its beauty, vitality and decay. The emotion is all in the detail, the ‘I’ barely features, yet the mood of the seasons, and their progression is keenly registered. Farmer’s poetry is remarkable in this respect, modest, self-effacing, and yet revelatory in its intensity.

Spare and attentive, [these poems] show how much feeling can live inside restraint.
Melanie Kembrey, Sydney Morning Herald

A work of brilliant concision, dovetailed with gentle nuance. Such was she also.
Shé Hawke

A slim, meditative tract that can be relished in one long sitting or savoured, over 365 days, one sculptured haiku at a time… In function reminiscent of Mary Oliver’s Devotions, each poem could easily constitute a daily orison or, perhaps more aptly – given Farmer’s Buddhist leanings – a daily kōan for the contemplation of life’s cycles, and of the scale, force, and transient nature of existence… In quietly attending to the world and presenting it to the reader, Farmer mediates the self in relation to the wider ecosystems it inhabits, including the elements through which it is nourished and consumed, impressing upon the self its place.
Marjon Mossammaparast, Australian Book Review

When Farmer writes in her essay “Mouths of Gold” in The Bone House that “ceremony is embodiment”, she could be describing her approach here. Unknown to the media culture of clickbait capitalism dominating our discourse, there are people performing such quietly unpublicised ceremonies all around us – night-walkers, boat skippers, people staring out the windows of a train. Beverley Farmer is one of their laureates. She proves once again in For the Seasons that the observance in language of the fine-grained reality of life in nature holds its own type of profit.
Gregory Day, Saturday Paper