Book picks similar to
Issa's Best: A Translator's Selection of Master Haiku, Print Edition by Kobayashi Issa
poetry
haiku
non-art-photo
zen
Crossing Stones
Helen Frost - 2009
Some women seem to prefer to rock the boat. Eighteen-year-old Muriel Jorgensen lives on one side of Crabapple Creek. Her family's closest friends, the Normans, live on the other. For as long as Muriel can remember, the families' lives have been intertwined, connected by the crossing stones that span the water. But now that Frank Norman—who Muriel is just beginning to think might be more than a friend—has enlisted to fight in World War I and her brother, Ollie, has lied about his age to join him, the future is uncertain. As Muriel tends to things at home with the help of Frank's sister, Emma, she becomes more and more fascinated by the women's suffrage movement, but she is surrounded by people who advise her to keep her opinions to herself. How can she find a way to care for those she loves while still remaining true to who she is?Written in beautifully structured verse, Crossing Stones captures nine months in the lives of two resilient families struggling to stay together and cross carefully, stone by stone, into a changing world.
Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen
DōgenLew Richmond - 1985
Moon in a Dewdrop contains the key essays of the great master, as well as extensive background materials that will help Western readers to approach this significant work. There is also a selection of Dogen's poetry, most of which has not appeared in English translation before.Dogen's thought runs counter to conventional logic, employing paradoxical language and startling imagery. It illuminates such fundamental concerns as the nature of time, existence, life, death, the self, and what is beyond self.
The Continuous Life
Mark Strand - 1990
It is a place created by a voice that moves with unerring ease between the commonplace and the sublime. The poems are filled with "the weather of leavetaking", but they are also unexpectedly funny. The erasure of self and the depredations of time are seen as sources of sorrow, but also as grounds for celebration. This is one of the difficult truths these poems dramatize with stoicism and wit.
Patrick O'Brian: A Life
Dean King - 2000
Like his life, O'Brian's death was marked by secrecy and confusion, sharpening the curiosity of his many readers who for years have speculated about the man behind the beloved Aubery-Maturin series of novels.Dean King at last unveils the story of Richard Patrick Russ, a writer and intellectual who emerged from the Second World War as Patrick O'Brian, a persona created by his imagination and refined over decades. To research this book, King crisscrossed Europe to speak to long-lost relatives, friends, and colleagues of his famously reclusive subject; now he has fashioned this wealth of information into a dramatic and compelling narrative. As King meticulously examines the events of O'Brian's life, he deepens and enriches our understanding and appreciation of O'Brian's work.
Heart Broken Musings: Rants | Poems | Quotes
Raunak Agarwal - 2020
Because let’s face it! We hoomans are obviously stupid and trust me unicorns are never wrong. Did you know? The horn of the unicorn symbolizes ultimate truth and it has the power to pierce the chest of anyone who tries to lie. Damn!‘Uuuuuuuunicornnnnnnnnnnnnn,’ I yawned, waking up, after being thrown back to our crap-shit called Earth.‘So fellow hoomans, let’s begin.’About the book:This book is a sarcastic and humorous take on various themes like love, life, humanity, healing, and heartbreak - expressed through 51 beautiful chapters of relatable quotes, musings and poems. It basically deals with what we humans go through on a day-to-day basis. Moreover, every chapter is accompanied by a unique and perfectly orchestrated author's rant or opinion focused on one single person; You.
This Is My Beloved
Walter Benton - 1943
After working on a farm, in a steel mill, as a window washer, as a salesman, and at various other jobs, he entered Ohio University in 1931, and in due course was graduated. He then spent five years as a social investigator in New York. During the second World War he served in the United States Army, being commissioned a lieutenant of the Signal Corps in the autumn of 1942 and later being promoted to a captaincy. After the war he returned to New York and devoted his time to writing.This Is My Beloved, the remarkable diary in verse that has become one of the most popular books of poetry, was his first published volume, though his work was already familiar to readers of Poetry, Fantasy, the Yale Review, and the New Republic. Never a Greater Need, a second selection of his poems, was issued in 1948. Walter Benton died in 1976.
The Norton Book of Nature Writing
Robert Finch - 1990
Darwin's ruminations on the Galapagos Islands, Melville's exploration of the "whiteness of the whale, " and Thoreau's communion with Walden Pond are monuments in the history of writing and thought. "The Norton Book of Nature Writing, " including 125 selections by 94 writers, is the fist definitive and comprehensive collection of the many voices of nature writing which have flourished in English and American over the last two hundred years.
Bad Bad
Chelsey Minnis - 2007
. . indulgent and melancholy . . . moments of extreme morbidity and anger."—Arielle Greenberg"Her poems take some getting used to."—Robert Strong"Many won't find her . . . acceptable at all...—Cole Swensen
I Am a Star: Child of the Holocaust
Inge Auerbacher - 1986
By then, the Nazis were in power, and she and her parents were rounded up and sent to a concentration camp. The Auerbachers defied death for three years until they were freed. This story allows even the youngest middle reader to understand the Holocaust.
Chūshingura (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers): A Puppet Play
Takeda Izumo - 1748
Written around 1748 as a puppet play, it is now better know in Kabuki performances. In the twentieth century, cinema and television versions have been equally successful. Donald Keene here presents a complete translation of the original text, with notes and an introduction that increase the reader's comprehension and enjoyment of the play. The introduction also elucidates the idea of loyalty. This traditional virtue, as exemplified in Chushingura, has never completely lost its hold on audiences, in spite of twentieth-century changes in Japanese society and moral ideas. Moreover, as Professor Keene points out, the excitement, color and violence expressed in the play may be considered the counterpoint to the austere restraint and understatement which are more commonly thought to be "traditionally" Japanese.
The Edge of the Alphabet
Janet Frame - 1962
A native of New Zealand, she is the author of eleven novels, four collections of stories, a volume of poetry, a children's book, and her heartfelt and courageous autobiography -- all published by George Braziller. This fall, we celebrate our thirty-ninth year of publishing Frame's extraordinary writing.
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
T.S. Eliot - 1948
includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people; Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list ...'In this famous essay T. S. Eliot examines the principal uses of the word, and the conditions in which culture itself can flourish.'So rich in ideas that it is difficult to select two or three of them for comment ... it is a natural history of culture.' Sunday Times
Times Alone: Selected Poems
Antonio Machado - 1983
He brings to the ordinary--to time, to landscape and stony earth, to bean fields and cities, to events and dreams--magical sound that conveys order, penetrating sight and attention. "The poems written while we are awake...are more original and more beautiful, and sometimes more wild than those made from dreams," Machado said.In the newspapers before and during the Spanish Civil War, he wrote of political and moral issues, and, in 1939, fled from Franco's army into the Pyrenees, dying in exile a month later. When in 1966 a bronze bust of Machado was to be unveiled in a town here he had taught school, thousands of people came in pilgrimage only to find the Civil Guard with clubs and submachine guns blocking their way.This selection of Machado's poetry, beautifully translated by Bly, begins with the Spanish master's first book, Times Alone, Passageways in the House, and Other Poems (1903), and follows his work to the poems published after his death: Poems from the Civil War (written during 1936 - 1939).