Books by David Lindley

How to Write a Haiku provides a concise introduction to the art of the haiku and takes the beginner through the process of capturing the fleeting moment or a high point of experience. This practical guide gives examples of haiku newly translated from the Japanese, as well as original haiku in English, and illustrates how the raw material of experience and recollection can be shaped into both formal and informal versions of the traditional haiku.  

The Song of Myself, whose title takes its cue from Walt Whitman's celebration of the self, Song of Myself, is a modern, free-flowing verse rendition of the classic Sanskrit text, The Bhagavad Gita. It provides a fresh reading of a much translated work that has become overlaid with both Eastern and Western ideas of spirituality which have obscured, and sometimes distorted, the central teaching: to know what the self is, what action is and what non-action is. In this new translation the author has sought to make those ideas clear through a readable verse translation that does not sacrifice literal accuracy, and with notes and commentary that will help the reader separate the complementary strands of this important syncretic work that has contributed to our understanding of the self and its delusions.

We do not know how we came to be here and our lives, in a manner of speaking, are lived for us. We accept life because we are unable to refuse it. We suffer a given condition, and we ourselves are inescapably material elements of that given condition. All our anxieties about it, and all our attempts to redeem our condition by some solving word or idea never take us beyond the stuff of thinking, where questions and answers share the same uncertain and fictitious qualities. No answers come from a voice emanating from the external, objective condition, from the world into which we have been born (unable, as we are, to will anything different). Only our subjective experience of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon, and ourselves as its creator, can rescue us from the confines of the objective and the given, from arbitrary existence.

A collection of poems tracking the changing weather of love and the seasons through a single year.

The first major poetry collection from David Lindley, bringing together published and unpublished poems of three decades. Most of the poems are short. 'A long poem tends to wander off from experience and doesn't leave you with that taste of being that I think is all that a poem can give.' The collection also includes a number of translations and versions from the Japanese and Chinese.

Aphorisms, reflections and essays on order and meaning, and on the principle of aesthetic sufficiency as the only valid form of mental judgment.

"For more than a century physicists have hoped that they were closing in on the Holy Grail of modern science: a unified theory that would make sense of the entire physical world, from the subnuclear re"

David Lindley re-examines the murder trials of Frances Howard and the historical representations of her as 'wife, a witch, a murderess and a whore', challenging the assumptions that have constructed her as a model of female villainy.

"Few revolutions in science have been more far-reaching--but less understood--than the quantum revolution in physics. Everyday experience cannot prepare us for the sub-atomic world, where quantum effects"