COMMENTS ON MAYFLY

Mayfly by Randy and Shirley Brooks is a peach! Quality abounds.

The Brookses also do a great job of editing for Mayfly.

Talk about focus! This little gem of a publication concentrates a lot of energy in a dozen or so very carefully considered haiku. The result is not going to knock Modern Haiku off its pedestal, but Mayfly elegantly fills a niche. Its redesign last year has moved the publication from a xeroxed-and-stapled-together look to a well crafted volume. The inspiration to use sumi-e on the cover -- and to award the original artwork to the best of issue -- is inspired and makes Mayfly (which always paid more for submissions than any other haiku publication) the most rewarding place to be published these days.

Well done -- though limited in size (too bad).

Sends my stuff back almost as fast as Ant5. I like its contents though. I rank it A3 and it would be A1 except Randy is such a sucker for haiku about mayflies!

Fine quality haiku in a small format twice a year. The new layout is pleasing to the eye. Each issue has a haiga on the cover; its haiku selected by the editors from the previous month's haiku. Amazingly, the original haiga is given to the poet. Publication is sometimes erratic.

I don't care for the new format, but I think this journal has consistently achieved its goal, to feature the individual haiku, in style

My problem with both Hummingbird and Mayfly is their tiny size. While they contain quality small poems I find the journal too small to stow and find later. So, I finally abandoned both subscriptions.