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by John Ida (Translator), Hidenori Hiruta (Translator), Kyoja Ishii (Translator)
There are few non-natives who have attained the facility and fluency with Japanese poetic forms that American poet and educator Kirby Record has achieved in his more than twenty-five years of living, teaching and writing in Japan. The selected poems in this volume represent a deep understanding of and affinity for an altogether unique Japanese aesthetic. Mr. Record succeeds amazingly well in transferring, or perhaps better translating, this understanding when he writes Haiku in English; each brief poem a collage of fleeting images, which can be recited in a single breath - the basic unit of human life. His mastery of the satirical form of Senryu, with its thematic material taken from every day life and its metric scheme of 5-7-5 syllables, is consummate. And the prosimetric form of Haibun is used with great skill and to stunningly moving affect in Record's piece written in commemoration of the great earthquake, and the tsunami it spawned, that struck Japan on March 11, 2011.
Author Biography
Kirby Record was born in 1947 in the state of Indiana, USA. He studied classics, linguistics and literature at Indiana University where he earned three degrees. He has lectured at numerous universities in America, Malaysia and Japan, including Indiana University, Harvard University, Showa Women's University, Keio University and Akita International University. He is a poet, has published three previous books of poems, many essays, and eight books on language, language-teaching materials and literature. Previous books of poetry include A Geography of the Soul, Edwin Poetry Press, 1999, and Simplicity, Poetry and Photography, Banta and Pool, 2002. He took the photographs used throughout this book. He is currently working as the Director of Language Programs and as a professor at Yamanashi Gakuin University
