"A collage of essays on childhood, language, spiritual biographies, and the writer's life, 'a vocation has no name'"--P. [4] of cover.

Rather than resist the vast changes sweeping Japan in the 19th century, the poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) incorporated new Western influences into his country's native haiku and tanka verse. Based on extensive readings of Shiki's own writings and accounts of the poet by his contemporaries and family, Donald Keene Charts Shiki's distinctive (and often contradictory) experiments with haiku and tanka, a dynamic process that made the survival of these genres possible in a globalizing world.

A memoir of "growing up in the U.S. and the Philippines circa WWII."

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A haunting book by a poet whose voice speaks of all our lifetimes Louise Glück’s thirteenth book is among her most haunting. Here as in the Wild Iris there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, simultaneously spectral and ancient. Winter Recipes from the Collective is chamber music, an invitation into that privileged realm small enough for the individual instrument to make itself heard, dolente, its line sustained, carried, and then taken up by the next instrument, spirited, animoso, while at the same time being large enough to contain a whole lifetime, the inconceivable gifts and losses of old age, the little princesses rattling in the back of a car, an abandoned passport, the ingredients of an invigorating winter sandwich, a sister’s death, the joyful presence of the sun, its brightness measured by the darkness it casts. “Some of you will know what I mean,” the poet says, by which she means, some of you will follow me. Hers is the sustaining presence, the voice containing all our lifetimes, “all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last.” This magnificent book couldn’t have been written by anyone else, nor could it have been written by the poet at any other time in her life.