On Knowing Oneself Too Well: Selected Poems of Ishikawa Takuboku“
At the turn of the twentieth-century, Ishikawa Takuboku took Japan’s ancient, highly formal poetic tradition and turned it to the purposes of an impassioned sensibility in a rapidly modernizing world. Beginning with poems rich in childhood sorrow and wonder, he progressed in his short life to a poetry of searing objectivity and miraculous self-knowing. Before dying of tuberculosis, Takuboku achieved in his poems a kind of Buddhist awakening, observing by their means the emptiness of self in a riveting and heartbreaking world. “Ishikawa died at twenty-six, lived long enough to change his name to woodpecker, died young, lived long enough to take an old form, tanka, and make it new. “The poet as woodpecker indeed: Ishikawa Takuboku’s clear pecked rhythms & images are a perfect delight.” – – Amazon Book review
