Written over a ten year span, these haiku in Smith’s collection appear spontaneously but have evolved over some arduous polishing — ten years visiting a monastery in rural Mississippi, and forty years as a father to his youngest son — the way water smooths rock at the bottom of a crystal-clear Ozark stream. The gloss, written later in 2023, approaches essay on the point at which prose travelogue meets pithy three lines of haiku, in wonderful haibun fashion of a spiritual journey of father and son. Shards is a marvelous, very personal gift.
Daniel L. Smith, poet 