Poet Details

Robert Epstein

Born: April 08 1954 in New York City New York, USA

Resides: El Cerrito, California, USA

E-mail: taylorepstein (at) earthlink (dot) net

I am a licensed clinical psychologist who practices psychotherapy in the San Francisco Bay Area. I came to haiku via a longtime interest in Eastern philosophy, aided especially by Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki. In addition, I have greatly appreciated the scholarly works and inspiration of R. H. Blyth. Since the early 1990s, after taking a class with Carolyn Talmadge, I have been writing haiku and senryu in earnest. Being chronically ill, my attention span is limited to the span of a haiku moment of which I have found many. I am deeply grateful for the Way of Haiku.

Books Published: The Breath of Surrender: A Collection of Recovery-Oriented Haiku (The MET Press, 2009); a clear view of [pinch book] (tribe press, 2003)

Selected Haiku
	Zen garden nothing stands out	long July afternoon at the railroad crossing the train goes on and on
	each swig of the bottled water the sky	fog lifted me
	spring breeze the dried flowers rustle on the window sill	back from vacation I let traces of sand remain in the car trunk

Credits: "Zen garden" – Flower from Another Country (Haiku Society of America Members' Anthology, ed. Wanda Cook and Linda Porter, 2007); "each swig" - Pegging the Wind: The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku (Winchester, VA: Red moon Press, ed. Jim Kacian, et al., 2009); "spring breeze" – Haiku World: An International Poetry Almanac, William J. Higginson (Tokyo, Kodansha, 1996); "long July afternoon" – The Haiku Anthology [expanded edition], ed. Cor van den Heuvel (New York: Norton, 1999); "fog" – Acorn 23 (2009); "back from vacation" – The Haiku Anthology [expanded edition], ed. Cor van den Heuvel (New York: Norton, 1999)