Watching Pilgrims Watching Me: haiku from Shangri-la Deqen Tibetan Region
125 x 180 mm, 64pp, colour cover, paperback, perfect bound
Price $AU 18.50
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Cover image and illustrations by Anna Xue Yang.
About the book
'a journey of discovery of Tibetan hearts, landscape and culture.'
'Hawthorne's Watching Pilgrims Watching Me is a book of gentle grace' - Christopher Bantick, Sunday Tasmanian
Breathtaking glimpses of Tibet through the haiku of a travelling poet. Jodie Hawthorne evokes the sights, smells and sounds of the sacred and mundane with striking subtlety. - program, New Voices Festival 2007
today
just mountains
and people who love them
Shangri-la was the name given to a place described in James Hilton's 1933 book, Lost Horizon. Ever since, there has been an ongoing search in Tibetan regions to find it. In the year 2000 the name of Zhongdian County, the area that inspired these haiku poems, was officially changed to Shangri-la.
Deqen is raw and earthy. It hosts a visual smorgasbord of snow-capped holy mountains, alpine lakes and forests, quaint Tibetan villages, open grasslands and deep gorges carrying wild rivers. The entire region is spotted with Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, temples and shrines. Flapping prayer banners, chalky white chortens, mounds of mani stones and prayer stakes offer protection to all those that ascend the plateau.
Deqen's landscape evokes a sense of calm and healing that provides a perfect environment for artistic expression. These qualities, combined with the constant challenges, paradoxes and inconsistencies, brought into being the haiku moments of this collection.