Names and Rivers

by Shuri Kido, Tomoyuki Endo (Translator), Forrest Gander (Translator)

A bilingual Japanese-English presentation of Shuri Kido’s
poetry, co-translated by Pulitzer prize-winner Forrest Gander Shuri Kido, known as the “far north poet,” is one of the
most influential contemporary poets in Japan. Names and Rivers brings the poems
of Shuri Kido to readers in North America for the first time, thanks to star
translator team Tomoyuki Endo and Pulitzer Prize winner Forrest Gander. Drawing
influence from Japanese culture and geography, Buddhist teachings, and
modernist poets, Kido presents a mesmerizing view of the world and our human
position in it. This is a world “that isn’t ours”—where the trees are sirens
while the people are silent, where snow lingers while language crumbles. Names
and Rivers is made of crossings, questionings, and mysteries as unanswered and
open as the sky. Bilingual Japanese-English production.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

Published September 20, 2022

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whenever Copper Canyon Press drops a book in translation, I usually snap into action and read it. I thought this collection was quite beautiful - especially the poem “Ritual Utensils” which to me was truly remarkable.

I don’t have a lot of referents to contemporary Japanese poetry, but I was reminded of Arthur Sze’s work while reading this. Where Sze is constantly challenging the way a moment is framed between the macrocosm and the microcosm to create a polyphonic whole, Shuri Kido plays with how language and our interpretation of the world sits in contrast to the world as the world. Kido’s work is concerned with language and the naming of things (Around here, when you ask the name of a tree, what you’ll hear is, “It’s a tree.” Yes, that’s a tree. Yes, that’s a mountain. Yes, and this is water.) The poems sit at the intersection between scientific knowledge and the poetic experience of the world, so folklore often crosses with perceptual phenomena (Chorea they called St. Vitus’s Dance, whose afflicted couldn’t stop dancing until their last breath. Humans can, by mistake, invent their own strange diseases. An accident unavoidable for a nonmetallic species in the realm of the visible.)

Its this tension between the known world and the experienced world that is why I would compare it to Sze, although Kido’s work is much more attentive to the world captured within a single poem. In this way, while Kido cites influence from Imagist poetry, it is also an evolution of it: a white cloud isn’t just a white cloud but contains the spectra of every color within it, and when there is no life to perceive it, it simply exists with no color at all, as it is not perceived.

It’s certainly interesting stuff! If you like poetry, it’s worth checking out - I found reading it left me calm and attentive.

[Harry Palacio · Rating 4 out of 5]

The correspondence is akin to life… gods birthday was the year humans wrecked upon a stove praying into the sky for the breast like mountains

[Kerfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do humans fit into the natural world? Can they? Where is their place?

The veil between living and dead, here and there, form and spirit, is thin and often cannot be firmly established. This is the location of Kido's poetry.

One wonderful aspect of this book is the inclusion of the Japanese across from the English translations. Each plays off the other--it does not matter if you can read Japanese. One thing distracting about the translations were the quotation marks--they often disrupted the flow of the text. I would have preferred that the words be italicized--or maybe just use whatever is used for quotation marks in Japanese. But that is a small quibble.

The poetry itself opens up the world over and over.

"Is everything just an image?
or is this only a wasteland where images overflow
and become a language?"

Language, too, can overflow.

[Megan Xing · Rating 2 out of 5]

I honestly didn’t love this but I think it’s also because I didn’t really get it. Shuri Kido has some really nice turns of phrase, but overall I thought the poetry was pretty flat. I think a lot of this is probably attributable to the translation, which is disappointing, but this was still interesting to read and a few lines linger with me. My favorite poems in this collection are “the title lost” (Nonferrous 1993), “a tiny little equation,” and “the rejected light” (The World—The Sea 2010).

[Peter Prokopiev · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. I suppose Shuri Kido is an intelligent person who can even write interesting poetry (cf. the two narrative poems in this book) and yet it seems that he is one of the many followers of the doctrine of contemporary poetry, which values ideas over things.

[Ausi · Rating 4 out of 5]

As this is in translation, I don’t think the language retains much musicality, however there’s a lot to ponder here conceptually.

Favorites:

Ritual utensils
Kozukata
Alchemy of summer
A tiny little equation

[Petr Torkanovskiy · Rating 4 out of 5]

You might name one thing after another,
But each loses its name in that same moment.

[Shawn Aebi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sensory overflow.

[Shelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I appreciated the author's notes explaining some of the locations in the poems.

[Azelyn Klein · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not understand this book
not really
I am left grasping at words like straws wondering
is this what it feels like to be confused by poetry?
maybe this collection is not for me
not here
not now