The first EU summit under the presidency of Herman Van Rompuy is held today in Brussels. Mr Van Rompuy originally proposed to meet at the regal Palais d'Egmont, only to be told to take a hike to some other place by many European leaders, who interpreted the unusual choice of location as their host's attempt to act like a king.

Now the summit will be held at the prestigious Bibliotheque Solvay. An unusual location for a summit, it fits the emerging Van Rompuy image of a professorial politician with a love for writing haikus - a short, Japanese verse form.

The name Haiku Herman has begun to stick. In part, this is because so little else is publicly known about him.

It is also because his personal website (www.hermanvanrom puy.be) not only gives prominence to his own poetic output (with up-to-the-month productions) but also uploads haikus written by fans in response to his.

Mr Van Rompuy's fellow summiteers have sometimes been regaled with his haikus. Since it is likely that more will be heard about them, it may be worth taking a hike to Haiku Herman's poetic world and back.

The best-known feature of the haiku is that it is a 17-syllable poem made up of three verses of five, seven and five syllables respectively.

But, as is made clear by Geoffrey Bownas's introduction to the recent edition of The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, it is not the only feature and certainly not the distinguishing one.

The best haikus show the intuitive flashes of Zen Buddhism: a suggestive image, unhampered by the messiness of everyday relationships enables the reader to leap from observation of the particular to insight into the universal.

Take, for example, a famous poem by the master Basho: "Old pond/Frog jumps in/Sound of water" (trying to reproduce the 17 syllables in English can ruin the immediacy of the original). The simplicity, as Prof. Bownas points out, contains a subtle movement from the unchanging (the pond), to the momentary (the frog's jump) and, finally, to the oneness of the two.

Another example from Basho: "Spring: A hill without a name/Veiled in the morning mist."

And: "Soon it will die,/Yet no trace of this/In the cicada's screech."

Skill with the form calls for deftness with other conventions and prosodic elements. Familiar to any European writer would be the use of alliteration and punctuation, enabling control over the lingering image.

The use, by some Maltese adapters of the haiku, of exclamation or interrogation at the end of the poem, is a movement away from the haiku's original ethos, since exclamations push an insight too hard while interrogations evoke a duality between seer and seen that the classic haiku seeks to overcome.

Much more in the original spirit is this example by Seamus Heaney, pointed out by Prof. Bownas: "Dangerous pavements./But I face the ice this year/With my father's stick."

Mr Heaney is here deploying other stylistic conventions of the haiku.

The "season word" ("dangerous pavements", or, in Japanese verse, "plum blossoms", for example) imbues the atmosphere with hints of time, colour and scents.

The "pillow-word" is a stock epithet often found in the second verse. It is conventional but lacquered with many meanings from frequent usage. When an original image is skilfully rested on it, the result is a flash of insight.

A glance at Mr Van Rompuy's original Flemish verse suggests (to this reader who has no Flemish) that much of his prosodic choices is lost in translation.

Even in Google English (though not always), Mr Van Rompuy's output shows a familiarity with the full range of the haiku's resources, which his fans' own verse, enthusiasm gambolling ahead of skill, does not reveal as often.

Here is the haiku (in Google translation) he wrote at the end of the last EU summit out of which he emerged as President-elect: "Three waves roll/Along the harbour/The trio's home".

The following haiku solicited the admiration of Hideki Ishikura, a Japanese member of the World Haiku Association: "A seagull on one leg/Standing staring at the sea./The cold did not hurt."

Mr Ishikura is himself a published poet and his own English rendition of Mr Van Rompuy's seagull haiku, posted on the website, would be at home in the Penguin collection: "A seagull on one leg/Surpasses cold/At the seaside."

The inversion of, and subtle changes in, the "cold-verse" and "sea-verse" provide an x-ray into the craftsmanship of haikus. Here, the changes shift the mood from stoicism to transcendence and rest the season word of "seaside" on the pillow of "cold" with surprising effect.

Some commentators have combed through Mr Van Rompuy's verse looking for buried political meaning. They found none in the archive of verses about ice, harbours, clouds and playful light.

The haiku is a poetic form stemming from a certain kind of worldly detachment.

If Mr Van Rompuy is playing any politics with it, it would lie in that very attitude: a display of detachment from the conventions of EU summits, as he tries to give shape to a new role in the life of the Union.

So far, however, that detachment has given rise, paradoxically, to accusations of unjustified grandeur.

It would be interesting to see whether, as his term of office unfolds, Mr Van Rompuy will turn away from the refined, delicate haiku towards its cruder, more satirical Japanese relative, the senryu.

ranierfsadni@europe.com