Shinkichi Takahashi is one of the truly great figures in world poetry. In the classic Zen tradition of economy, disciplined attention, and subtlety, Takahashi lucidly captures that which is contemporary in its problems and experiences, yet classic in its quest for unity with the Absolute. Lucien Stryk, Takahashi's fellow poet and close friend, here presents Takahashi's complete body of Zen poems in an English translation that conveys the grace and power of Takahashi's superb art. "A first-rate poet . . . [Takahashi] springs out of some crack between ordinary worlds: that is, there is some genuine madness of the sort striven for in Zen." -- Robert Bly; "We visit places in Takahashi that we once may have visited in a dream, or in a moment too startling to record the perception. . . . You need know nothing of Zen to become immersed in his work. You will inevitably know something of Zen when you emerge." -- Jim Harrison, American Poetry Review

Capturing in verse the ageless spirit of Zen, these 150 poems reflect the insight of famed masters from the ninth century to the nineteenth. The translators, in collaboration with Zen Master Taigan Takayama, have furnished illuminating commentary on the poems and arranged them so as to facilitate comparison between the Chinese and Japanese Zen traditions. The poems themselves, rendered in clear and powerful English, offer a unique approach to Zen Buddhism, "compared with which," as Lucien Stryk writes, "the many disquisitions on its meaning are as dust to living earth. We see in these poems, as in all important religious art, East or West, revelations of spiritual truths touched by a kind of divinity."