Basho's Ghost - Softcover

Hamill, Sam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0913089079 ISBN 13: 9780913089071

Publisher: Broken Moon Pr, 1989

Synopsis

Embodied among travel sketches and portraits of people and places visited during his 1988 stay in Japan on a Japan-U.S. Fellowship, Sam Hamill presents a reading of Japanese poetry beginning with the eighteenth-century anthology, Man'yoshu, tracing the development of the Japanese poetic imagination up through the seventeenth-century poet Bash , the eighteenth-century monk/poet Ry kan, and concluding with Japan's first Mondernist poet, Takamura Kotar . Visiting places in Japan's north country where Bash traveled three hundred years ago, Hamill drawns upon his own zen practice of twenty-five years, and upon his lifelong study of Asian literature, encountering some of Japan's foremost poets, introducing them as he would old friends met along a great journey.

Bash 's Ghost is a literary exegesis located in personal memoir, a"deep reading" performed with translucent grace, often poignant and always revealing. It is a true poet's book, a book of the heart.

About this title

About the Author

SAM HAMILL's celebrated translations of Chinese and Japanese classics have been re-translated into Greek, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch. He is the author of thirteen volumes of original poetry and three volumes of literary essays, including A Poet's Work, and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. He is Founding Editor of Copper Canyon Press.

Edition details

• Publisher: Broken Moon Pr
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0913089079
• ISBN 13: 9780913089071
• Binding: Paperback