Some books feel like destinations. Others feel like passports. This one is neither. Bridges of Words is a journey—unrushed, borderless, and made of verse so small you could fit it in your palm, yet so vast it seems to echo across mountain ranges and centuries.
Reading this collection is like boarding a train that stops not at stations, but at soulscapes. The haikus—delicate in size, immense in scope—don’t offer commentary or narrative. They offer presence. They ask you to notice. A petal falling in Japan. The call of a bird in Nigeria. The hush of light in a Danish winter. Each haiku arrives like a moment that would otherwise be missed if you hadn’t slowed down.
This is poetry at its most global, but also at its most grounded. There’s no imposed message here. No cultural “summary.” Just moments. Moments that carry the scent of rain on cobblestones, the hush of temples at dawn, the wind in open fields, the glimmer of desert stars. Pretila isn’t guiding you so much as pointing gently, saying, “Look.”
And you do. You find yourself traveling not through fact but through feeling. And yet, the real world pulses underneath the lines. There’s Canada’s northern wind, the Amazon’s breath, Jerusalem’s stone paths, and Korea’s ancestral hush. It’s like reading the world through its pulse points.
The haiku form—traditionally Japanese, often tied to nature, and brief by design—doesn’t just serve as a stylistic choice here. It’s an ethic. It’s a restraint that honors each country without crowding it. In an era of oversharing, this book whispers. And in doing so, it teaches something important: reverence.
What sets Bridges of Words apart is not just its scope—57 countries!—but its refusal to reduce them. There are no sweeping generalizations or cultural clichés. Each poem feels observed, even if imagined. It’s as if the writer walked barefoot across each land, pausing only to write down what could not be ignored.
The emotional cadence shifts subtly between entries. Some haikus carry the stillness of snowfall. Others, the rattle of drums or sea wind. But all seem to share a kind of humility. They don’t strive to explain the world—they merely let it speak.
This is not a book to consume in one sitting. It’s a book to return to between flights, after conversations, in quiet mornings. It functions less like a narrative and more like a weather pattern—moving, recurring, sometimes quiet, sometimes stirring. But always honest.
And while the book isn’t overtly about peace, or education, or diplomacy, one suspects it may do more for cross-cultural understanding than entire shelves of theory. Because it reminds us, with startling clarity, that before borders and policies, there was always poetry. There were always words.
And some of those words, when arranged just right, don’t just describe the world—they bridge it.
Jay’s the resident literary connoisseur. He dissects classics and uncovers hidden gems. Expect his insights to enrich your reading journey, one page at a time.
