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

A Fire in the Head

Fitzsimons, Andrew

The Insomniac's Weather Report, originally published in 2011 as the winner of the Three Candles Press First Book Award, explores the impermanent boundaries that define and - due to their nebulous nature - fail to define the human condition: those between body and self, parent and child, energy and matter. Shifting between formal and prose poems, the myriad voices in this book include an insomniac struggling to delineate the edge between consciousness and sleep, and a couple trapped in a poem cycle that is itself an interlocking meditation on the oblique lines between self and other that constitute marriage. "Jessica Goodfellow's debut collection The Insomniac's Weather Report is admirably diverse in its approaches and structures and reads like 'a fugue of opposites', integrating the scientist's persistent enquiry and the philosopher's rarefied obsessions with this poet's highly tuned and unique sensibility 'in a blaze of form and discontent'. With their keen intellect and capacity to hold ambiguity, Goodfellow's poems are most successful when their complex abstractions are grounded in the body, image, and the human. For this reader, the power of these poems inhabits that space where logic and reason fail, efforts to name and place break apart, and chaos threatens to annihilate. This is a challenging and original debut." (Mari L'Esperance) "To say that The Insomniac's Weather Report is exquisitely thrilling poetry doesn't begin to do it justice. Wicked and funny as an encyclopaedia of unanswerable koans, elegant as a fifteenth-century flowered silk kimono portraying, perhaps, 'a hinge on a hingeless door', it is also savage - containing a hidden history of 'marriage, / perpetual stagger of desire / and resist' - and I found it irresistible, as will you, dear reader." (Alicia Ostriker)

The Insomniac's Weather Report

Goodfellow, Jessica

The poems in One More Civil Gesture, the first full collection by C. E. J. Simons, frequently take their subjects from singularities of nature and art - things that are wonderful not because they are unusual or rare, but because they deserve wonder, no matter how familiar: animal life; the seasons; family; myth; well-known Shakespeare plays. They aim, as Geoffrey Hill has said, to restructure banality into beauty without denying the banal. Simons wrote much of the book in Japan, where he has lived since 2006, and in the interstices of frequent travel in Asia, particularly to Burma, China, and Mongolia; the cultures and landscapes of these places, as well as of England and his native Canada, inform the work. The gestures of these poems are civil in two senses: in their bold and exciting use of inherited forms, whether Western or Japanese; and in their aspiration to eschew self-expression in search of representations of the human capacity to engage with the other - to be civilised through immersion in the unknown. "With something of Ted Hughes's unflinching power, allied to a troubled compassion, Chris Simons draws on a richly diverse range of subjects in poems that deal with the devastations and losses of the present, the past, and prehistory. Rhyme and violence are yoked together as 'Time picks history clean as a carcass', a cameraman earns a tough, affecting elegy, 'the anthropomorphic lie' confronts 'the truth in the hawk's eye', and the civil gesture of poetry encounters much that threatens its attempted composure. This is an impressive first volume." (Michael O'Neill) "Beneath the formal gestures in C. E. J. Simons's debut collection, there resides a great sense of loss that threatens to undo each poem from within. Each gesture, each line, is an attempt at domesticating various forms of grief. One More Civil Gesture is a work of beauty." (Mariko Nagai) "In One More Civil Gesture Christopher Simons explores the strictures of civilisation on our natural state: these are layered poems, informed by the poet's travels - both physical and in the metaphorical 'realms of gold'. Simons gives voice to a contained passion - and gives a new edge to contemporary formal writing." (Claudia Daventry) "Performance and the stage provide the setting for many of the poems here, and theatrical stylisation - the way that overt artificiality can heighten our sense of the real - is strongly reflected in Simons's deft handling of formal structures." (Alan Buckley)

One More Civil Gesture

Simons, C.E.J.

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

In Snow Bones "Masaya Saito…has crafted a masterpiece which illuminates further possibilities for haiku in English, crosses and perhaps eliminates the threshold separating the genres of “haiku” and “modern poetry” as such. Always, I felt as though I were reading what has been left, those evaporating bones of lived experience, which Saito invites me to recreate in flesh." – Richard Gilbert, Kyoto Journal Snow Bones consists of four narrative haiku sequences spoken by seven different voices. The first sequence begins in winter in the north of Japan and is concerned with the death and funeral of the speaker’s mother; in the fourth sequence, this narrator once again goes north in winter to attend his father’s funeral. The two central sequences, one set in a metropolis and one in the countryside, pass through spring and summer to autumn; each sequence is narrated by three different speakers as they move through environments which they share without ever encountering each other except at a distance. Masaya Saito says: "Each of the narrators in Snow Bones lives through his or her daily life experiencing the transience of its moments. Their inner worlds leak through their monologues – and yet we never really know who they are. Each one of us seems – mysteriously – to be an individual entity, and we, like the seven narrators, move around not knowing the answer to this mystery – or perhaps not even perceiving it as one – a mystery whose beauty and ambiguity I wanted to present through the accumulation of numerous tiny concrete images." "Those who know his work have been waiting patiently for more from Masaya Saito, and now, some thirty-four years after his slender and beautiful volume Ash, we are finally rewarded. Snow Bones is an altogether more ambitious work, with an intricate structure and a broader palette, but reveals the same intensity and attention to detail we would expect from this poet. The wait has been worth it." — Jim Kacian

Snow Bones

Saito, Masaya

Kotan Chronicles: Selected Poems 1928-1943

In Kotan Chronicles, Japanese author and activist Genzō Sarashina shares his experience as a second-generation settler in Hokkaido during the 1920s and 1930s. Many of his poems document his encounters with the Ainu, the indigenous people of the island, in an era where the traditional world of the kotan, or Ainu village, was slowly disappearing. Sarashina’s distinctive voice probes the ambiguities of the interaction between the Ainu and the Japanese, while depicting both the beauty of Hokkaido’s landscape and the back-breaking work required of settlers and Ainu alike to survive there in an era of economic hardship. Kotan Chronicles constitutes an exceptional witness of its times.

Sarashina, Genzō

Kotan Chronicles takes the reader into the lives of the Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido, and their interaction with Japanese settlers in the 1920s and 1930s, a period when the traditional world of the kotan, or Ainu village, was being destroyed by the rapid development of the island. With a distinctive and powerful artistic voice, the poems of Genzō Sarashina probe this extraordinary cultural encounter in Japan’s far north, depicting both the beauty of the Hokkaido landscape and the back-breaking work required to survive there in an era of economic hardship. Kotan Chronicles constitutes an exceptional witness of its times. 

Il Porto Sepolto was written in the trenches of northern Italy while Giuseppe Ungaretti was serving as a private in the Italian army; when the collection was published in Udine in 1916, it changed Italian poetry. Part of its impact was due to the influence of Japanese poetry, which Ungaretti had recently encountered in Italian translation. In his introduction, Irish poet and Tokyo resident Andrew Fitzsimons explores the nature and history of Ungaretti’s engagement with Japanese poetics; the book also includes sixteen vibrant illustrations by another Tokyo resident, the renowned Italian artist Sergio Maria Calatroni. This is the only complete translation into English of the Udine first edition: the poems of a ‘man present at his own / fragility’ that spoke to their moment, and continue to speak one hundred years later.

The Sunken Keep

Ungaretti, Giuseppe

This anthology presents a carefully arranged and strikingly diverse selection of poems from the issues of NOON: journal of the short poem that appeared between 2004 and 2017. Focusing on poems of less than fourteen lines, Philip Rowland has assembled a richly suggestive, renga-like chain of over two hundred poems by almost half as many poets, at the same time showcasing some of the most interesting minimalist poetry being written in English today.

Noon: An Anthology of Short Poems

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Books by Isobar Press

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

From the Japanese

A Fire in the Head

The Insomniac's Weather Report

One More Civil Gesture

World Without

Snow Bones

Kotan Chronicles: Selected Poems 1928-1943

Kotan Chronicles: Selected Poems 1928-1943

The Sunken Keep

Noon: An Anthology of Short Poems