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The Genre – Renku is a modern term for linked verse written according to the school of the renowned Japanese master Matsuo Basho (1644–1694). A collaborative activity involving two or more writers, poets take successive verses and/or compete to provide the most appropriate stanza for any given verse position. The poem is not a narrative sequence, employing instead the concept of ‘link and shift’ whereby each added verse relates in a controlled way to that which immediately precedes it, but marks a comprehensive departure from the content of the verse before that. Diagrammatically – in the sequence A B C D: D will follow from C, but be wholly different to B, just as C will follow from B, but be wholly different to A etc.

The Form – Nijuin is the name given to a twenty verse sequence employing the compositional criteria proposed by the poet Meiga Higashi. Renku is not pure improvisation – there are macrostructures that influence the overall dynamics of the piece, and govern the content of some verses. Many of these considerations are extremely subtle but readers may note the fourpart movement of ‘The Winter Sun’: introduction, development part one, development part two, and closure. The particular seasonal references and the position of verses relating to love, the moon, and blossom are consequent on the poem having been commenced in winter: a fact reflected most unambiguously in the opening verse, the hokku.

The Stanza – Teikei is a Japanese term meaning ‘set pattern’. The principal cadences of Japanese poetics are based on phonetic clusters of seven and five syllables. These are traditionally, and wholly erroneously, construed in English as ‘lines’, hence the awkward English tercet of five, seven and five syllables that makes claim to be a haiku. So forced and inelegant is this structure that English language poets have in recent years abandoned the concept of strict form whilst preserving the three line model: a practice which may be likened to throwing away the burger and eating the napkin.

‘The Winter Sun’ adopts stanza structures based on the 'zip' style haiku, a format originally proposed in the first issue of World Haiku Review http://www.worldhaikureview.org. The long verse (choku) comprises fifteen syllables deployed at will over two lines, each line broken by a triple space (caesura). The short verse (tanku) is composed of eleven syllables written as a single line, broken in two places by identical caesurae. Line-break and caesurae are intended to inflect both the meter and the semantic movement of the verse. Typographically, the long verse centres on its caesurae.