Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Beyond her family and home, Erika Schwalm had two great loves: ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, in which (for a non-Japanese) she held an unusually high qualification from the Sogetsu school to exhibit the art and train others in it; and haiku. She was in fact, from her base of the Frankfurter Haiku Kreis, one of the buzzing engines of haiku activity in the German-speaking world, and did much to bring haikuists of various nations together. One measure of her dynamism is the number of one-day and often whole weekend events Erika organised, or helped to organise, or got others to help her organise (the three modes were barely distinguishable when Erika got her teeth into a project!) in Frankfurt and its environs -something like a hundred such meetings over a span of about fifteen years. She had a particular flair for bringing her two passions together; when attending a world ikebana conference in Switzerland, she gave a talk on ‘ikebana and haiku’.

   Sadly, we have to report that her work as one of the organisers of the inaugural European Haiku Conference in Bad Nauheim in May, 2005, was to turn out to be her last engagement of that kind, for a very rapid onset of cancer took her from us in mid-December of the same year.

   The German Haiku Society’s bulletin announcing her death ends with the words, Sie fehlt uns sehr. (We shall miss her very much.) We would like our German friends to know that some of us here in Britain have good reason to miss her sadly too, and we trust others will come forward from their ranks to pick up the baton Erika had to let fall.   

Der neue Rosenbusch                      the new rosebush
wollt ihn den Gästen zeigen.             I wanted to show the guests -
Em Dieb kam über Nacht.               a thief in the night             

Erika Schwalm                                (tr. David Cobb)