A bird-loving man: haiku and tanka collects haiku, tanka, haibun, tanka prose and sequences from a variety of locations and experiences. Rodney Williams’ poems have a thoughtful musicality and romance, a sense of humour and sadness to which many people will relate. The poems are carefully crafted, honest and unsentimental, working well on many levels and eliciting a variety of genuine emotions in the reader. They have such sharp details that one can immediately visualise the context. Here we encounter poems that readers living in Australia will be able to interpret with their direct knowledge of local birds, beaches, forests and wildlife. But this is not to say that international readers will not also enjoy the poems, as many are broadly relevant to life.‘ - Patricia Prime, editor Kokako (NZ)