John McManus is a man of few words. This is not obvious when John is speaking. The volume is not particularly loud, but he has plenty to say. His words are chosen more carefully when writing.

John, 33, is a care worker who lives off Wigton Road in Carlisle. His wife Gemma works for local charity Trinity Area Community Trust.

So far, so normal. But John is also a writer of haiku: the concise form of poetry which was born in Japan. His first collection has just been published.

Most haiku have only three lines. They can have as few as one. Life is distilled into a handful of words. John crafts little grenades; tiny things that can be quietly devastating.

shopping mall Santa
the bald boy asks
for more time

“Being able to tell a whole story in a particular snapshot, that’s what haiku allows you to do,” says John. “There’s so much story going on in that one. Did he get more time? That reflects a lot of how we live our lives. Every day we go out and see people. ‘That person doesn’t look too well.’ You never know what happened to them because you’re too busy with your life.

“I’m interested in people. It’s probably a big part of where the haiku comes from. Out and about, just waiting to get on a bus, I’m listening to what people are saying or watching people.”

John’s subject matter ranges widely. His lighter poems tend to concern his son Kieran, 10, and daughter Eryn, six.

summer’s end
wringing the ocean
from her hair

“That was about a day at Blackpool with my kids down on the beach. I had to wring my daughter’s hair out after she decided to go in the water. Just silly little things like that.”

day’s end
my daughter asks
for the moon

“It got dark one night. My daughter was looking out of the front window. ‘Where’s the moon, dad? I can’t find the moon.’”

John’s working life also appears on the page. He has been a care assistant for the past 11 years and currently works at Applegarth Nursing Home in Carlisle.

“I’ve worked with a lot of people with various disabilities. Doing the type of job I’ve done for so long, it’s made me realise how vulnerable and how fragile people are. Quite a lot of that finds its way into my work.

“I like to share things that I think people would relate to. I think the one thing everybody can relate to is loss. Everybody experiences what it feels like to have despair. I was very close to my nana. When she died I went with my mam to the funeral directors to see the body. It didn’t look like her. I felt nothing. I didn’t know what to think. I just felt very numb.”

funeral home
feeling nothing about
feeling nothing

John says some people regard such topics as too dark for haiku, which is traditionally seen as a light form of poetry.

“For me it’s like any good form of art – it reflects life. You can’t get away from the fact that in life you’re going to come across people that hurt themselves, that hurt other people. Growing up in a place like Carlisle where there’s a lot of deprivation, I tend to relate to tougher topics of life. Poverty, addiction.”

fourth time at rehab
a moth circles
the canteen light

“I’ve never been in rehab. But one of my closest friends ended up at the Carleton Clinic. He took too many drugs and went a bit mad, to put it bluntly. 

"That was about me trying to work through the emotions. I’d lost one of my closest friends. He’s out now and as far as I know he’s ok. But it’s not the same after what he’d been through.”

The structure of a three-line haiku is similar to that of a joke. A line to set up a situation, a line in limbo, then a resolution. John says: “Generally I start off with a phrase or a fragment for the first or last line. And looking for something to juxtapose that with. Other times I get something instantly. It comes fully formed and I have to write it down.”

One example came when an American poet sent John a haiku. John wrote his own version of the same theme, which took seconds to compose:

crayon map
my son shows me the way
to Neverland

Japanese haiku traditionally take nature as their subject. Some of John’s do the same, sometimes with a twist:

birdsong
some of the poets open
their notebooks

Elsewhere John’s is a world of clinics and factories as well as seas and trees. One haiku is based on an incident from his time working at Metal Box on James Street in Carlisle.

factory gates

a night-shift worker shreds

his lotto ticket

John began writing stories at Belah primary school, and songs at Trinity secondary school. He thinks the songwriting helps with his poetry’s rhythm and musicality.

He started writing poetry about 10 years ago. Short-form felt natural. He read haiku by Japanese masters and gave the genre his own flavour.

John has won awards. He produces Frozen Butterfly, the first English-language haiku video journal. You can see it on YouTube: poets reading their work from countries including USA, Bulgaria, India and Saudi Arabia.

“It’s quite an international community. There’s people all over the place.” But there are few haiku writers in Cumbria. John is unaware of any others in his home county.

If I didn’t write it down I’d constantly have these lines in my head

He feels that poetry is generally under-appreciated, despite its influence. “To my mind poetry is the cornerstone of things like hip hop and Shakespeare.

“They’re two huge cultural movements that are still very relevant today. But at the same time people probably won’t rush to the bookstore to buy William Blake.

“I think a lot of people don’t think of poetry as being relevant to their lives. I studied Seamus Heaney at school and didn’t enjoy it. Maybe people have just had too many experiences like that so they’re not willing to give it a try.”

John describes haiku writing as self-therapy. “Working out little issues I’ve got going on inside my head. I have to write.

“If I didn’t write it down I’d constantly have these lines in my head. Once they’re written down I can forget about it.

“My favourites are probably any of them to do with my children. They’re a little reminder of things we’ve done.

“Hopefully when they’re older they can look back and say ‘I remember that.’ It’s like leaving them a little legacy.”

John often reads his work to his children. Kieran sometimes asks “Is that it, dad?” “Yeah. It’s supposed to be short.”

Inside His Time Machine by John McManus is published by Iron Press, £6.