The Pond: Poems from Ueno Park and Shinobazu Pond

by Wayne Pounds

Poems from Tokyo's Ueno Park and its temple complex, Ground Zero for the Fire Bombing of Tokyo by the US Army Air Forces in March of 1945. The toll of the dead reached 100,000, outnumbering the immediate tolls of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The pond itself, Shobazu Pond, survived, as it has survived all other local events since the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age. The poem that remembers the bombing is called "In the Season when the Dead Return." It doesn't mention the catastrophe itself. Of course not. It's a poem. The book ends with a coda mocking official Japanese attitudes toward the Fukushima tsunami and attendant nuclear disaster. The poem is called "The Wisdom of Monju" and Youtube has a video of my reading it at Infinity Books in Asakusa.

76 pages, Paperback

First published November 21, 2011

About the author

Wayne Pounds, besides having published a stack of academic essays and monographs, is the perpetrator of five chapbooks of poetry, four books of family history, and a collection of documented narratives about early-day killings in Oklahoma. He was born in Oklahoma and grew up there and in northern California. He began his career as a poet in the 7th grade imitating Ogden Nash and his graduate career in the jungles of Vietnam keeping a low profile. PhDeed at the University of Kansas, 1976. Lived and taught in Japan thirty years, now retired. The attraction of his books may be that he sees American matters from Japan. The books he is willing to own may be found at Amazon.com with this link: https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/ent...