Basho's Ghost

by Sam Hamill

Embodied among travel sketches and portraits of people and places visited during his 1988 stay in Japan on a Japan-U.S. Fellowship, Sam Hamill presents a reading of Japanese poetry beginning with the eighteenth-century anthology, Man'yoshu, tracing the development of the Japanese poetic imagination up through the seventeenth-century poet Bash, the eighteenth-century monk/poet Ry kan, and concluding with Japan's first Mondernist poet, Takamura Kotar . Visiting places in Japan's north country where Bash traveled three hundred years ago, Hamill drawns upon his own zen practice of twenty-five years, and upon his lifelong study of Asian literature, encountering some of Japan's foremost poets, introducing them as he would old friends met along a great journey. Bash 's Ghost is a literary exegesis located in personal memoir, a "deep reading" performed with translucent grace, often poignant and always revealing. It is a true poet's book, a book of the heart.

Paperback

First published June 1, 1991

About the author

Poet, editor, translator, and essayist, Sam Hamill is author of more than thirty books including two from BOA Editions, Gratitude (1998), and Dumb Luck(2002). He has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including ones from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, two Washington Governor’s Arts Awards, the Stanley Lindberg Lifetime Achievement Award for Editing, and the Washington Poets Association Lifetime Achievement Award for poetry. He co-founded Copper Canyon Press, and has worked extensively in prisons and with battered women and children.

Reviews

[Paul H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Respectfully — stop being such a weeb, Sam.

[Scott Ballard · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took some time to adjust from the anticipation that this would be much more ‘poetic’ of a piece. Once I let that go, the journey unfolded with its own rhythm which is much more than a home to Basho.