Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20th Century Master

by Takako Lento (editor), Wayne Miller (Editor)

Poetry. East Asia Studies. Literary History & Criticism. After the end of World War II, Japanese poet Tamura Ryuichi began publishing Arechi (The Wasteland), a literary magazine charting a new course for Japanese poetry. Over the next fifty years, Tamura produced innovative and haunting poems inspired by an extraordinary range of poets from all over the world, including T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. Though Tamura is little known in the U. S., he is considered to be among the very most important Japanese poets of the 20th century. In this second volume of the Unsung Masters Series, editors Takako Lento and Wayne Miller present more than forty pages of Tamura's poetry, as well as essays on Tamura's work by both Japanese and American writers.

Genres: Poetry

191 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2010

Reviews

[Woody · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really love this "Unsung Masters Series" from Pleiades Press. Ryuichi's poetry is brilliant; it haunts me in ways I don't fully understand. What does it mean to begin to write in a land that is already Wasteland, rather than to write like Eliot did, watching a land become a Wasteland? Some of the accompanying essays only scratched at the surface, but what I learned about Ryuchi's biography and his poetics was absolutely rewarding.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received this book almost purely by chance, but it really did trigger a total shift in my ideas of poetics, just as Osman's 'The Network' did about half a year prior. Ryuichi is really an unsung master, as the intro here suggests, and deserves a look from anyone interested in the strange post-war permutations of high-modernism.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wrote a review of this book for TriQuarterly. Here's the link: http://www.triquarterly.org/reviews/t...