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Genre: Poetry

  • Forest of eyes : selected poems of Tada Chimako

    One of Japan’s most important modern poets, Tada Chimako (1930-2003) gained prominence in her native country for her sensual, frequently surreal poetry and fantastic imagery. This title presents a selection from Tada’s extraordinary oeuvre, including nontraditional free verse, poems in the traditional forms of tanka and haiku, and prose poems.

  • Good quiet

    Poems.

  • Moonstone woman : selected poems and prose

  • Dogen’s extensive record : a translation of the Eihei koroku

    Dogen is known for two major works. The first work, the massive Shobogenzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), represents his earlier teachings and exists in numerous English translations; the second work, the Eihei Koroku, is a collection including almost all his later teachings, such as short formal discourses to the monks training at his…

  • Narrow road to the interior and other writings

    The most complete single-volume collection of the writings of one of the great luminaries of Asian literature. Basho (1644-1694) – who elevated the haiku to an art form of utter simplicity and intense spiritual beauty – is best known in the West as the author of Narrow Road to the Interior, a travel diary of…

  • Basho’s Narrow road : spring & autumn passages : two works

    Matsuo Basho (1644-94) is considered Japan’s greatest haiku poet. Narrow Road to the Interior (Oku no Hosomichi) is his masterpiece. Ostensibly a chronological account of the poet’s five-month journey in 1689 into the deep country north and west of the old capital, Edo, the work is in fact artful and carefully sculpted, rich in literary…

  • The spring of my life : and selected haiku

    Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), along with Basho and Buson, is considered one of the three greatest haiku poets of Japan, known for his attention to poignant detail and his playful sense of humor. Issa’s most-loved work, The Spring of My Life, is an autobiographical sketch of linked prose and haiku in the tradition of Basho’s famous…

  • America & other poems

    Winner of the 2004 U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission Award for the Translation of Japanese Literature from the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University. Poems.

  • Violet obsession : poems

    Poems.

  • A long rainy season : Haiku & Tanka

    A thousand years ago women poets at the Japanese imperial court created a written aesthetic of unmatched elegance and technical skill. Today, Japanese women poets write with equal sophistication about romance, family life, and sexuality, and about divorce, loneliness, feminism, politics, and the West. In this landmark anthology of traditional short verse (the haiku and…