Postcards To Donald Evans

by Takashi Hiraide

Art/Poetry Takashi Hiraide is one of the leading poets of Japan's post-war generation, travelling extensively, including three months as a poet-in-residence at the University of Iowa International Writing Program. POSTCARDS TO DONALD EVANS chronicles Hiraide's travels through places as varied as Iowa, to Seattle, Tokyo, and Amsterdam. He currently lives in Tokyo.

170 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2003

About the author

Takashi Hiraide was born in Moji, Kitakyushu in 1950. He has published numerous books of poetry as well as several books of genre-bending essays, including one on poetics and baseball. He has also written a novel, A Guest Cat; a biography of Meiji poet Irako Seihaku; and a travelogue that follows the traces of Kafka, Celan, and Benjamin in Berlin. His poetry book, Postcards to Donald Evans, is published by the Tibor de Nagy Foundation. Hiraide is a professor of Art Science and Poetics as well as a core member of the new Institute for Art Anthropology at Tama Art University. For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut won the 2009 Best Translated Book Award for poetry.

Reviews

[Mr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's difficult to describe this odd and beautiful book. In a sense, it's a biography of Evans, but is also autobiographical on Hiraide's part. A book of poetry and an epistolary travelogue. Hiraide explores the physical and social space inhabited by Evans during his lifetime, the artist's own imaginary realms, and the universal kingdom of grief. Gentle, thoughtful, elegiac, hopeful, kind. There's a uniqueness of vision here, heightened by the simplicity and earnestness of the language, which reads smoothly in translation.

I wish more of Evans' art or Hiraide's postcards could have been reproduced in this edition, but that's not the fault of Hiraide's work; it may have been a matter of publisher expense.

[Martin Rock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Postcards/ prose poems to a dead artist who painted very real stamps for the postal systems of imaginary countries. Excellent read.

[Nadine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful book about an artist that I had previously not known.