Basho

Basho
Author: Bashō Matsuo
Publisher: Kodansha
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2008
Genre: Haiku
ISBN:
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Matsuo Basho stands today as Japan's most renowned writer, and one of the most revered. Yet despite his stature, Basho's complete haiku have never been collected under one cover. Until now. To render the writer's full body of work in English, Jane Reichhold, an American haiku poet and translator, dedicated over ten years to the present compilation. In Barbo: The Complete Haiku she accomplishes the feat with distinction. Dividing the poet's creative output into seven periods of development, Reichhold frames each period with a decisive biographical sketch of the poet's travels, creative influences, and personal triumphs and defeats. Supplementary material includes two hundred pages of scrupulously researched notes, which also contain a literal translation of the poem, the original Japanese, and a Romanized reading. A glossary, chronology, index of first lines, and explanation of Basho's haiku techniques provide additional background information. Finally in the spirit of Basho, elegant semi-e ink drawings by well-known Japanese artist Shiro Tsujimura front each chapter.

Checkered Mates

Checkered Mates
Author: Tricia Knoll
Publisher: Kelsay Books
Total Pages: 54
Release: 2021-03-13
Genre:
ISBN: 9781954353138
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In a letter-poem to her first husband, who's having sex-change surgery, Tricia Knoll writes, "You are wise to join us. We need all the smart ones we can assemble." Knoll might well chair that assembly herself; but the poet's piercing intelligence is enhanced in this superb collection by wryness, compassion, and often enough, humor. Precise and rangy at once, she seems to strike the right note no matter what she considers, her work aptly served by her uncanny eye for exact and eloquent detail. -Sydney Lea, Poet Laureate of Vermont (2011-2015)The poems in Tricia Knoll's Checkered Mates-by turns tender, raw, and truthful-mark a departure from her usual work. Though her lifelong intimacy with the natural world remains omnipresent in this volume as well, she more often turns her incisive gaze toward humans and her own past relationships. Yet no matter the subject, the "honest harvest" of these poems is always their authentic unfolding so that we emerge from each poem, and the book as a whole, more aware of our own mortality, ready to "break open / the way love does." -James Crews, Editor of How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude & Hope Tricia Knoll is an original, her slant on life curious, generous, cheeky, and always surprising as she "backtrack[s] matrimonial trails" and "embrace[s] bare facts," including the "kindness of getting old." Whether standing on a dike in New Orleans, lifting weights with a friend, or waiting in the airport for an ex-husband who has undergone gender-affirming surgery, she remains alert to eros, compassion, and the play of metaphor. For all the life in her narratives, her rhythms and sounds are equal to them-"Low-slung, the lunar face is acned styrofoam," or "A soft wind dries the sweat of climb"-as she moves through poems with the tenacity of a chess player. Mate. -Rebecca Starks, Author of Time Is Always Now

The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia

The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia
Author: Philip Lamantia
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 504
Release: 2019-10-22
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0520324811
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The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia represents the lifework of the most visionary poet of the American postwar generation. Philip Lamantia (1927-2005) played a major role in shaping the poetics of both the Beat and the Surrealist movements in the United States. First mentored by the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, the teenage Lamantia also came to the attention of the French Surrealist leader André Breton, who, after reading Lamantia’s youthful work, hailed him as a “voice that rises once in a hundred years.” Later, Lamantia went “on the road” with Jack Kerouac and shared the stage with Allen Ginsberg at the famous Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, where Ginsburg first read “Howl.” Throughout his life, Lamantia sought to extend and renew the visionary tradition of Romanticism in a distinctly American vernacular, drawing on mystical lore and drug experience in the process. The Collected Poems gathers not only his published work but also an extensive selection of unpublished or uncollected work; the editors have also provided a biographical introduction.

The Columbia Granger's Index to African-American Poetry

The Columbia Granger's Index to African-American Poetry
Author: Nicholas Frankovich
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 1999
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780231112345
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Responding to the enormous interest in African-American literature, Columbia University Press is publishing a Granger's(R) index devoted exclusively to poetry by African-Americans. To compile the Index to African-American Poetry, a team of consultants indentified the best, most widely available anthologies and volumes of collected and selected works. The result: this new index includes more than 11,000 poems by 659 poets.

Bashō's Journey

Bashō's Journey
Author: Matsuo Bashō
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2010-03-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0791483436
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In Bashō's Journey, David Landis Barnhill provides the definitive translation of Matsuo Bashō's literary prose, as well as a companion piece to his previous translation, Bashō's Haiku. One of the world's greatest nature writers, Bashō (1644–1694) is well known for his subtle sensitivity to the natural world, and his writings have influenced contemporary American environmental writers such as Gretel Ehrlich, John Elder, and Gary Snyder. This volume concentrates on Bashō's travel journal, literary diary (Saga Diary), and haibun. The premiere form of literary prose in medieval Japan, the travel journal described the uncertainty and occasional humor of traveling, appreciations of nature, and encounters with areas rich in cultural history. Haiku poetry often accompanied the prose. The literary diary also had a long history, with a format similar to the travel journal but with a focus on the place where the poet was living. Bashō was the first master of haibun, short poetic prose sketches that usually included haiku. As he did in Bashō's Haiku, Barnhill arranges the work chronologically in order to show Bashō's development as a writer. These accessible translations capture the spirit of the original Japanese prose, permitting the nature images to hint at the deeper meaning in the work. Barnhill's introduction presents an overview of Bashō's prose and discusses the significance of nature in this literary form, while also noting Bashō's significance to contemporary American literature and environmental thought. Excellent notes clearly annotate the translations.

Lorine Niedecker

Lorine Niedecker
Author: Lorine Niedecker
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2002-05-23
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 052093542X
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"The Brontës had their moors, I have my marshes," Lorine Niedecker wrote of flood-prone Black Hawk Island in Wisconsin, where she lived most of her life. Her life by water, as she called it, could not have been further removed from the avant-garde poetry scene where she also made a home. Niedecker is one of the most important poets of her generation and an essential member of the Objectivist circle. Her work attracted high praise from her peers--Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Cid Corman, Clayton Eshleman--with whom she exchanged life-sustaining letters. Niedecker was also a major woman poet who interrogated issues of gender, domesticity, work, marriage, and sexual politics long before the modern feminist movement. Her marginal status, both geographically and as a woman, translates into a major poetry. Niedecker's lyric voice is one of the most subtle and sensuous of the twentieth century. Her ear is constantly alive to sounds of nature, oddities of vernacular speech, textures of vowels and consonants. Often compared to Emily Dickinson, Niedecker writes a poetry of wit and emotion, cosmopolitan experimentation and down-home American speech. This much-anticipated volume presents all of Niedecker's surviving poetry, plays, and creative prose in the sequence of their composition. It includes many poems previously unpublished in book form plus all of Niedecker's surviving 1930s surrealist work and her 1936-46 folk poetry, bringing to light the formative experimental phases of her early career. With an introduction that offers an account of the poet's life and notes that provide detailed textual information, this book will be the definitive reader's and scholar's edition of Niedecker's work.