This is the essential English edition of the complete poems of the eminent Japanese master of the haiku, Matsuo Bash�.   Matsuo Bash� (1644–1694) is arguably the greatest figure in the history of Japanese literature and the master of the haiku. Bash�: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bash� offers in English a full picture of the haiku of Bash�, 980 poems in all. Andrew Fitzsimons’ translation is the first to adhere strictly to form: all of the poems are translated following the syllabic count of the originals. This book also translates a number of Bash�’s headnotes to poems ignored by previous English-language translators.   In Fitzsimons’ beautiful rendering, Bash� is much more than a philosopher of the natural world and the leading exponent of a refined Japanese sensibility. He is also a poet of queer love and eroticism; of the city as well as the country, the indoors and the outdoors, travel and staying put; of lonesomeness as well as the desire to be alone. His poetry explores the full range of social experience in Edo Japan as he moved among friends and followers high and low, the elite and the demi-monde, the less fortunate: poor farmers, abandoned children, disregarded elders. Bash�: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bash� reveals how this work speaks to our concerns today as much as it captures a Japan emerging from the Middle Ages. For dedicated scholars and those coming upon Bash� for the first time, Fitzsimons’ elegant translation—with an insightful introduction and helpful notes—allows readers to enjoy these works in all their glory.  

A Fire in the Head contains two complementary works, both of which emerged out of the aftermath of the March 2011 earthquake in Japan.The title poem-sequence takes the 5-7-5 form of the haiku to create an accumulating narrative of life adjusting to altered circumstance. The essay 'What Are Poets For?. . .' explores the efficacy of art when confronted with calamity, and from within the experience of the catastrophic events offers a response to the question: in a time of need, what use is a poem? ("In these three-line poems, Andrew Fitzsimons has captured what Basho called 'the revelatory light of things'." Mutsuo Takahashi) "Among those who have taken on the challenge of writing about Japan's triple catastrophe, none has done so with greater intensity or economy than Andrew Fitzsimons. Gently, indirectly, in a sequence of bright flashes, his haiku sequence illuminates that unforgettable period when the vocabulary of radioactive contamination entered the language of everyday life and when Japanese could no longer trust the ground beneath their feet. His essay, 'What Are Poets For? ...' makes spine-tingling literary connections with other moments of 'unrelievable, directionless despair', and celebrates, as Yeats did, the 'bright energy required for the necessary task of renewal'." (Richard Lloyd Parry) "Andrew Fitzsimons's A Fire in the Head is a marvelous, elegiac sequence, conceived in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake. With beautiful drawings by Sergio Maria Calatroni, it is an intimate, universal, poised and skillful confirmation of poetic craft and duty. (Gerard Fanning) "These haiku register with a rare compassion and clarity shifts that are seismic as well as intimate. Their economy belongs as much to perception as to form." (Jamie MacKendrick)

The Tsurezuregusa is a collection of wise, witty, compassionate and, occasionally, cranky ruminations on the business of living by the monk, Kenko (c1283-c1350). The poems in What the Sky Arranges speak in a voice and tell of things derived from Kenko: reading, travel, good and bad taste, exile, art, art bores, technophobia, scandal, sex, gardening, game theory, graveyards, friendship, death, the moon . . . "Tender, philosophical, disabused, these poems are a putting in order of 'the business of life'. Worked from The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko they are wide-awake, alert, moving from joy to disgruntlement, from bleak advice to quiet celebration: the kind of poetry that gets written in the early hours of the morning when the poet remembers the dates on gravestones. The poetry is in the detail, the things that are all too easy to miss (maple leaves, wisteria, 'morning glories on a low fence, / not too high, and not too many', the waxing and waning moon, 'what the sky arranges'), and equally in the subtle music of Andrew Fitzsimons' language." (Peter Sirr) "A truly wonderful sequence of poems, combining a lightness of touch with great depth and resonance, and one to be enjoyed in the words of the work itself 'under the lamp alone / a book spread out before you: bliss'. Absolute bliss, indeed." (David Peace) "These poems are really stunning: shafts of truth, beautifully crafted. The way they link Eastern and Western traditions of precision and eloquence is magical." (Bernard O'Donoghue) "Gently witty, wise, finely phrased variations on Kenko's themes. A pleasure to read and reflect on." (Royall Tyler) The thirty poems are complemented by nine striking drawings by the well-known Italian artist, photographer and designer, Sergio Maria Calatroni, now resident in Tokyo.