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Shortlisted for the 2019 Touchstone Distinguished Books Award administered by The Haiku Foundation. Given Honorable Mention place in the Prose category of the 2020 Haiku Society of America Merit Book Awards.
This collection of essays considers the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho (1644-94) from four different and, in some respects, unconventional perspectives. It begins by likening Basho and John Keats as travellers, open to all experience and convinced that they must ‘annihilate self’ to achieve true poetry. The second essay looks at how perceptions of Basho’s famous ‘frog’ haiku have changed over time, and the contentious issue of how far it can (or should) be read in Zen Buddhist terms. The third essay, written from the viewpoint of a translator struggling to render Basho’s ‘cicada’ haiku into English, explores authentic issues of language and interpretation; at the same time, however, it is evident that something else is going on in the translator’s mind. The final essay revisits the ‘frog’ haiku, but now as a metaphor for a much larger philosophical question: why are we so intolerant of the unintelligible - of the very notion that the universe, and with it our world, came into being without reason, necessity, or purpose? Implicitly the four essays are linked by Basho’s injunction to ‘Go to the pine to learn about the pine’, that is, to try and get to the truth of things as they are, unencumbered by our own thoughts and preoccupations.
