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"A profound collection of poetry from Japanese poet Hirata, expounding on readership and everyday life. American readers' awareness of contemporary Japan, through literature and poetry, has increased in recent decades, but many are still left with little means of understanding the everyday cultural phenomena that makes Japanese culture what it is. Hirata uses her poems to genuinely investigate aspects of Japanese culture in a way that makes it easy for the reader to understand, and she has an extraordinary way of breaking down a normal event, like seeing an old man riding a bicycle in a park, into a journey that elucidates something profound. Her poems gain prosody while keeping a core narrative aspect which is colored with her own dark and warm artistic lens. Every poem in Is It Poetry? helps the reader understand and think about what is to be cherished, feared, loved, and what is not"--
About the author
Hirata Toshiko is one of Japan’s best-known contemporary poets, as well as a renowned playwright and author of seventeen novels. She is associated with the ‘women’s boom’ in contemporary Japanese literature. Her collection,
Shinanoka (Tokyo, Shichōsha, 2004), or,
Is It Poetry? earned Hirata the Hagiwara Sakutarō Prize for poetry.
Eric E. Hyett and
Spencer Thurlow are a poetry translation team from Massachusetts. Their first translated book,
Sonic Peace by contemporary female Japanese poet Kiriu Minashita (Phoneme Media, 2018), was shortlisted for the 2018 National Translation Award and the 2018 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. Their translations and essays have appeared in
Granta,
The Georgia Review,
World Literature Today,
Modern Poetry in Translation,
Pendemics,
Transference,
The Cincinnati Review.
Summary
A profound collection of poetry from Japanese poet Toshiko Hirata, expounding on readership and everyday life.
Produced on the same day each month over the course of two years, every poem in Is It Poetry? (a pun also meaning "the seventh day" in Japanese) is a window into everyday life in Japan. Toshiko Hirata's poems evoke awe and light in the daily minutiae of contemporary life, achieving both prosody and narrative cohesion colored by her dark yet warm artistic sensibility. Beloved and awarded in Japan, Hirata possesses an extraordinary ability to turn an ordinary event like an old man cycling through a park into a journey that elucidates something profound.
This translation offers entry into a busy Tokyo brimming with puns, imagery, sounds, and whimsy and asks what is to cherished, feared, loved—and what is not.
