Basho's Ghost

Basho's Ghost by Hamill, Sam. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780913089071.

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, Manyoshu, 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 Japans first Mondernist poet, Takamura Kotar . Visiting places in Japans 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 Japans 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 poets book, a book of the heart.