Sharing a train window

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Last Train Home, a new collection of haiku, tanka, and rengay celebrating train travel! The book is edited by me, with contributions from poets around the world.

Over the past year, many of us have had to cancel trips and stay close to home. But there are no limits to where our imaginations can take us. Last Train Home is an invitation to remember past trips, and imagine the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and emotions others have experienced crossing the Canadian prairies or the Australian Outback, climbing China’s Yellow Mountain, travelling at night between Paris and Madrid, glimpsing Mount Fuji, stopping at border crossings, and so much more. It also looks forward to when we can once again travel freely, get together with family and friends, meet new people, and explore new places.

In the meantime, I’d like to welcome you on a virtual train tour, beginning with a photo of sunrise from Saskatoon station on my first cross-Canada VIA Rail trip back in the mid-1980s. The haiku that follows speaks to more recent experience on the same train—sharing a dining table with different passengers each day.

sunrise

across the dining car

an exchange of hometowns


Jacquie Pearce

And a few more selections from the book:


Paris to Milan train

the baby cries

in every language


Karen Hoy



departing Valencia

as my vacation ends

scent of oranges


Roberta Beach Jacobson



dark night

a migrant catching sleep

on the last train


Adjei Agyei-Baah

Last Train Home is available on Amazon in various countries. You can also drop into the Last Train Home -haiku Facebook page for more poems, photos, and stories related to the book and train travel in general.

To keep the virtual train going, I’m inviting other creative writing bloggers to share their train stories and photos and link back here.

Next stops on the tour:

kcdyer, Vancouver-based author of the literary travel adventure, Eighty Days to Elsewhere

Poet Julie Thorndyke from New South Wales, Australia

Haiku Railroad Blues video with US haiku poet Alan Pizzarelli

Crafty Green Poet, Juliet Wilson, writing from Edinburgh, Scotland

a past train post by UK poet Alan Summers and a new post about the train anthology.

Haiku poet Agnes Eva Savich shares some of her train haiku and images from her 1998 European train travels

Tags: haiku, rengay, tanka, trains, travel