At the turn of the twentieth-century, Ishikawa Takuboku took
Japan's ancient, highly formal poetic tradition and turned it to
the purposes of an impassioned sensibility in a rapidly modernizing
world. Beginning with poems rich in childhood sorrow and wonder, he
progressed in his short life to a poetry of searing objectivity and
miraculous self-knowing. Before dying of tuberculosis, Takuboku
achieved in his poems a kind of Buddhist awakening, observing by
their means the emptiness of self in a riveting and heartbreaking
world. On Knowing Oneself Too Well offers, in Tamae K. Prindle's
lucid translations, the most comprehensive selection available in
English of this vital modern poet. "Ishikawa died at twenty-six,
lived long enough to change his name to woodpecker, died young,
lived long enough to take an old form, tanka, and make it new, died
young, lived long enough to read foreign books and taste foreign
wine, died young but had chance to sing himself a long song,
Whitman's eyes turned humbly, fiercely outward, careful what he
sees, died young, lived long enough to build a body of poems that
moves me the way weather does, birds and shabby autumn trees and
all the other sorts of things that die young and make a spectacle
of themselves, funny reminders, revelations, quiet ecstasies. Died
young and left poems of a wry beauty, given to us here in quiet,
affectionate English translation." -Robert Kelly "The poet as
woodpecker indeed: Ishikawa Takuboku's clear pecked rhythms &
images are a perfect delight. Are they large rain drops sparingly
tapping the drum-taut paper of a shoji-screen or the poet's tensed
fingers rapping on his tablet? The reader sits & listens &
looks and the world grows quiet except for that nano-perception
that now begins to fill the world. The small daily pain or
pleasure, exquisitely brought over into the simplest of words: and
yet, all the world is thus said." -Pierre Joris
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