Not a book of  English translations of Japanese poems (although it does include versions of haiku by Basho and by the contemporary haiku master Natsuishi Ban'ya), but rather a series of 'translations' of the experience of a long-term British resident of Tokyo; it also acknowledges the personal and cultural gifts received 'from the Japanese' over the last forty or more years. The poems by Paul Rossiter collected here range in time from a version of a prose poem by Basho (done in London in 1969 before he had any idea he would visit Japan) to an elegy for the city of Ishinomaki, severely damaged in the tsunami of 2011. The book moves through the years between these two pieces by way of reports from Tokyo in the era of the Vietnam War, sharply visualised descriptions of dance and theatre performances, evocative poems of place, street-life vignettes, an appalled visit to Hiroshima, meditations on the pleasures and ambivalences of cross-cultural experience, and translations of two of Paul Rossiter's poems into Japanese by the well-known Japanese-language poets Arthur Binard and Kisaka Ryo, and  of five of his haiku by Natsuishi Ban'ya.

From the Japanese

Literature & Fiction

Rossiter, Paul

Poetry

Isobar Press

World Without, the fifth collection of poetry by Paul Rossiter, gathers writing from 2008-2015. The title section of the book celebrates music, ancestors, places and occasions in Japan, England, Greece and Italy; this is followed by 'Landscapes', a sequence of largely elegiac poems; 'Found in Transcription', poems created from pre-existing texts, ranging from seventeenth-century descriptions of Cornwall to Piet Mondrian's letters from London in 1938-1940; and 'Ars Longa', a series of short poems about poetry. The final section, 'White Foxglove', brings together a Chinese nature goddess, a response to the work of the film-maker Patrick Keiller, and the landscape of north Cornwall (the part of England where Paul Rossiter was born in 1947). The poems in the collection range widely in time and setting, but place and landscape, both as constructed by history and as experienced by someone inhabiting or moving through them, are constant concerns.

World Without

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Books by Rossiter, Paul

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rossiter, Paul. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

From the Japanese

World Without