Poetry Books by John Sandbach

Releasing March 2022.

“Dandelion” is my fourth collection of haiku. I have decided in this book to display these haiku like the Japanese do their own – in a single line. This format is more yin in nature, more feminine – in keeping with the current drift of humanity toward a softer more receptive focus. The ancient Chinese have taught us in the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine that long and thin is yinner than whatever is compact and blocky, which is yanger. Therefore a sperm is more yin and an egg more yang. […]

These haiku do not adhere to the rules of classical haiku. They are not all seventeen syllables long, and they don’t all use a word to denote the season. They are in the style of many modern Japanese freeform haiku. So what rules do I follow when I write haiku? There are four: A haiku must be little on the outside (meaning short), a haiku must be big on the inside (meaning roomy), a haiku must be full of something (energy, matter, space or time will do, and), a haiku must be full of nothing (it can contain energy, matter, or time, but it always has to contain space, and preferably lots of it). In this way, haiku reflect our own being, for as science tells us, what we are is mostly empty space. […]

Portraits of Clouds is John Sandbach’s first book of haiku since the publication of Invisible Castle: The Collected Haiku of John Sandbach. Though grounded with great love and affection for both the haiku traditions of Japan and the West, John Sandbach’s haiku represent a clear break and, hopefully, a new, influential, and open beginning in English-language haiku composition that welcomes and values all methodologies, aesthetics and topics, seeing infinite possibilities and equality in every path. Breaking away from what has become the traditional standards in English haiku, Sandbach creates new, fresh and exciting directions and possibilities for composition, expanding the English-language haiku poet’s toolbox.

The 73 poems of John Sandbach’s book “Surface Paint” are stylistically varied, though they all bear in common a sense of the wondrous and fantastic. In this book you will find both lyric and narrative poems, as well as portraits and insights into some of Sandbach’s favorite authors such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Barbara Guest, and Gertrude Stein. You will find surrealism everywhere, and poems as well that have been inspired by the Language Poetry movement.

In development.

‘The 42 poems in this book are ones I wrote just prior to beginning a second period of focusing on the writing of haiku. The first period of haiku writing has a great impact on my work. The severe limits of such a small form caused me to think in compressed and hence intense terms, and this intensity I believe has carried over into all my other writing in a big way, the present work included.All the poems in Magic Poet are about magic, in one way or another. I believe that the purpose of magic is to provide a doorway into other realms, so that through gaining a clearer picture of the true nature of the universe we come to understand more fully the true nature of the world in which we live. […]

The 720 poems in this volume have been gathered from John Sandbach’s monumental text The Circular Temple, a two volume study of the 360 degrees of the zodiac. The Oracles of the Circular Temple are divided into two sections: “The Omega Oracles” and “The Azoth Oracles,” each containing 360 numbered poems. For those readers who wishes to further pursue the mysteries and subtleties of this text […]

A great many of the themes that run through this book are the same ones seen flowing through my other books of haiku. My writing continues to drift toward greater abstraction and subjectivity, and I will also say that since this is the direction in which I’m headed it appears that the pace most comfortable for me is slow. Maybe this has to do with my feeling a need to place stones before me as I step, as I don’t like to tread on mud or weeds.Haiku has helped me immensely to put my rationality aside […]

A book of tanka.

Coming soon.