Long Rain is an exquisite collection of five line poems (tanka) and short prose (haibun), organized around the elements: Earth, Wind, Fire and Water. Here, Moore expands on the rich history of African-American writers such as Richard Wright, Sonya Sanchez and James Emanuel, creating a masterful transformation of the Japanese tradition into a sharply observant and quietly defiant poetry of the Black experience in America.
"In Long Rain Lenard D. Moore has written tanka of lucidity and tranquility. Those who read him for the first time will be enchanted to find that they are in possession of a lyrical drama." —Toru Kiuch. Editor of American Haiku: New Readings
“Lenard D. Moore’s poems are intimate, sensuous, transporting you to the moment, making you a willing voyeur. The landscape of the South sprinkled with its people is stark and sensual, taste the apple, feel the rain on your eyelid, walk into this journey. These are delicious poems you will read over and over again, each time experiencing new vibrations." — Opal Palmer Adisa.
“Lenard Moore is a Japanese poet who lives in North Carolina, or a North Carolina poet who lives in an imaginary medieval Japan. He has been a farmer, an American soldier in Germany, a schoolteacher; his ancestors came from Africa in chains. He seems, to the world’s eye, to be as representative a husband, father, and citizen as any sociologist might point to as a statistically ordinary well-behaved American. And the sociologist would be wrong, for Lenard Moore is a poet, and all good poets are extraordinary, and very good ones are unique.” —from the introduction by Guy Davenport.
One of the foremost practitioners in English of Japanese poetic forms, and the first African American President of the Haiku Society of America, Lenard D. Moore has been published in more than sixteen countries and translated into more than twelve languages.
