Book of the WeeK : Somokuto (Grass and Tree Cairn)
Santoka published Somokuto (Grass and Tree Cairn), an assemblage of earlier chapbooks, several months before he died of a heart attack while asleep drunk. The sparkling introduction by Stephen Addiss contains a biographical sketch which adds to the author’s own autobiographical comments relating individual poems to settings and incidents in the author’s life, while his translations succeed in making the poems accessible even to foreign readers.
I go in I go in still the blue mountains
Winter shower I’m still not dead
Autumn’s come I sit in the weeds
You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library.
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Haiku featured in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by THF Digital Librarian Garry Eaton, and are used with permission
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We are talking about the book “Santoka :: Grass and Tree Cairn”, published by Red Moon Press, 2002; translations :: Hiroaki Sato, illustrations :: Stephen Addiss, right? I’m under the impression that Mr. Sato also wrote the Introduction. At least that’s the impression my copy of the book gives me.