Basho stands today as Japan’s most renowned writer, and one of the most revered. Wherever Japanese literature, poetry or Zen are studied, his oeuvre carries weight. Every new student of haiku quickly learns that Basho was the greatest of the Old Japanese Masters.

Yet despite his stature, Basho’s complete haiku have not been collected into a single volume. Until now.

To render the writer’s full body of work into English, Jane Reichhold, an American haiku poet and translator, dedicated over ten years of work. In Basho: The Complete Haiku, she accomplishes the feat with distinction. Dividing his 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. Scrupulously annotated notes accompany each poem; and a glossary and two indexes fill out the volume.

Reichhold notes that, "Basho was a genius with words." He obsessively sought out the right word for each phrase of the succinct seventeen-syllable haiku, seeking the very essence of experience and expression. With equal dedication, Reichhold sought the ideal translations. As a result, Basho: The Complete Haiku is likely to become the essential work on this brilliant poet and will stand as the most authoritative book on the subject for many years to come. Original sumi-e ink drawings by artist Shiro Tsujimura complement the haiku throughout the book.

As English writers explore foreign poetry genres they are no longer writing completely in the style of the original. We need to find a new comprehensive term for these new works. This anthology of symbiotic poetry gives you examples.

For the first time all the tanka in Akiko Yosano's 1901 book, Midaregami - Tangled Hair, have been translated into English. Each of the tanka has the original kanji version, a romaji version and the English so readers in both languages can appreciate the depth of Yosano's poetry. One of the reasons these 399 tanka have not been translated before is the difficulty of discovering the ambiguity in the poems. Machiko Kobayashi, a professional translator with a degree in English Literature has teamed up Jane Reichhold, a tanka poet and translator of six books from the Japanese. Introduction to the book is written by Aya Yuhki, editor of The Tanka Journal in Tokyo.

Nearly 5000 haiku by Jane Reichhold, written in English between 1993 - 2013 have been arranged according to the five seasons and seven traditional saijiki categories of Japan. However the haiku within the categories are arranged alphabetically - which makes this a dictionary.

A Film of Words is the result of a writing project devised by this pair who have been writing together in the Japanese genres for over 20 years. In this book they combine haiku, tanka, haibun, haiga, free verse and prose along with graphics from both artists.