This book consists of original and translated tanka, haiku and haiku sequences by James Kirkup. He was born on April 23 (Shakespeare’s birthday) in 1918 in UK. At the moment he is a resident of Andorra, a country in the Pyrenees, between Spain and France.
Its prologue says that chaos has its own chaotic order. So although some of these haiku and tanka sometimes seem to be in a certain conventional order, there is a fluid turbulence in their non-linear arrangement of random intermittences. The result shows that chaos and order can exist together: as in Zen, there is no duality, only a great oneness. In order to diversify the rhythm of chaos, he had interspersed the main text with haiku sequences and group of translations. There are also occasional tanka which create what James Gleick in Chaos describes as a 'butterfly effect'.
What is the 'butterfly effect'? The 'Jurassic Park' written by Michael Crichton is a science fiction written on the base of this butterfly effect. I checked it on the Internet (http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/beffect.html). The butterfly effect is the propensity of a system to be sensitive to initial conditions. Such systems over time become unpredictable. This idea is explained as follows: a butterfly flapping it's wings in one area after many vicissitudes causes a tornado to occur in another remote area. The butterfly effect has been most commonly associated with the weather system as this is where the discovery of non-linear phenomenon begins.
Most of his tanka with an exception and his original haiku are composed in strict syllable count, but his translated haiku and works of haiku sequences 'Snow viewing' are examples in free form haiku.
A tanka in free form:
In this life
events which have never
taken place can increasingly
result in a disastrous
absence of consequences!
A translated haiku in free form from the French:
Vertical
dazzle of
full summer
The name of this book is "Formulas For Chaos". James Kirkup brought the Chaos Theory into the world of poem. A butterfly's flapping in Andorra will cause a tornado to occur here in Japan or in the world.
