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The Iowa poet-priest who mastered haiku
Raymond Roseliep quietly became one of the most highly regarded haiku poets in the English language.
Poet and priest Raymond Roseliep (Reprinted with permission of the Telegraph Herald)
Mother, why is
Father dying on the cross
in our cornfield?
The image startles the way many of Raymond Roseliep’s images startle. His association between the figure and the cornfield underscores Ezra Pound’s poetic dictum, “Make it new.” As dark and as stark as that image is, a Roseliep haiku can also be unapologetically whimsical:
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