Sea, Land, Shadow

the people, the boats completely gone with the tsunami / tonight you would not be able to sleep -from Sea, Land, ShadowSea, Land, Shadow, the fourth collection by Kazuko Shiraishi to be published by New Directions, comprises work written over sixty-years, from 1951 to 2015. Shiraishi, described by Donald Keene as the outstanding poetic voice of her generation of disengagement in Japan, sees the world in a grain of rice and finds poetry in a mountain-road traffic jam. In the haunting title poem, she visits Iwanuma not long after the disastrous tsunami hit in 2011 and finds no houses but a place where houses had been. This pamphlet also includes a long, lyrical homage to Yukio Mishima, as well as playful and profound meditations on a Roman condom, lizard god, god of war, and an ear.