Isobar Press publishes poetry in English by Japanese and non-Japanese authors who live (or have lived) in Japan, or who write on Japan-related themes. Isobar also publishes English translations of modernist and contemporary Japanese poetry, and (occasionally) English translations of poetry in languages other than Japanese but which has a strong Japanese connection.

In London, Isobar books are available from the London Review Bookshop, 14 Bury Place, London WC1A 2JL, tel: 020 7267 9030.

In Tokyo, Isobar books are available from Books Kinokuniya Tokyo in Shinjuku (Shinjuku station south exit store).

LATEST REVIEWS

Peter Tasker has posted a marvellous review of Sanki’s memoir of his war-time life in Kobe, The Kobe Hotel: Memoirs (translated by Masaya Saito). ‘The experiences that Sanki relates are variously hilarious, absurd, poignant and horrific. The range of themes evokes Joseph Heller’s great novel Catch 22. The collection certainly gives a startlingly different perspective from the home front during the war. Forget about the Japanese propaganda slogans of “100 million with one spirit” and the like. Sanki introduces a cast of mostly penniless characters, himself included, who “believed that freedom, and nothing else, was the highest reason for living.”’ Click here to read the whole review.

Billy Mills has posted wonderful reviews of the three most recent Isobar books – John Gribble’s My Brother Goes Down to the Sea (‘There’s a quiet mastery … that stems from Gribble’s control of form’), Iain Maloney’s Mountain Retreats (‘[The] final lines from the sequence form a resolution that has been implicit all through … the ending is arrived at, not imposed’), and Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s Luna (‘[The] ability to make the extraordinary ordinary is at the heart of this book’s achievement’) – along with reviews of interesting pamphlets by Dag T. Straumsvåg (who I hadn’t previously heard of) and John Levy (who I definitely had heard of). Thank you so much for these, Billy! Click here to read the whole review; you’ll need to scroll down a bit for the Isobar volumes.

INFORMATION ABOUT ORDERING ISOBAR BOOKS

Click here for information about  ordering Isobar books from Kinokuniya, for delivery to Ireland, and from Amazon.

NOTABLE REVIEWS

CLICK here to read REVIEWS of seven recent Isobar books: This Overflowing Light, Tre Paesi and Other Poems, An Open Parenthesis, Waking to Snow, VOU: Visual Poetry, Tokio 1958–1978, Wintermoon and Kusudama. REVIEWS BY Alan Botsford, Ian Brinton, Simon Collings, Gregory Dunne, Jennifer Harrison, Karl Jirgens, Judy Kendall, Louise George Kittaka, Kris Kosaka, Paul Miller, Billy Mills, Alice Wanderer, and Nadine Willems.

 

JUST PUBLISHED

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa: Luna

Eric Selland on Jane Joritz-Nakagawa: Hers is a radically open form – a framework through which the data of life, and poetic themes and materials, freely migrate.  She does not reject the personal, but she does not privilege it either.  It is simply part of the data.

It has been four years since Joritz-Nakagawa’s highly acclaimed 2020 collection, Plan B Audio.  In her new book, Luna, the ‘data of life’ include such things as the coronavirus, the wars in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, cruelty to animals, environmental destruction, and disability, among others.  Although the terrain is often dark, there is hope in the form of interconnectivity and empathy:  ‘another’s loss / becomes / your own” and for some spirituality found in the natural world.

June 2024. 96 pages. 210 x 148 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-48-9 (paperback).

Click here to read an excerpt from this book.

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John Gribble: My Brother Goes Down to the Sea

My Brother Goes Down to the Sea is John Gribble’s second full-length collection. The poems explore various bodies of water – ranging in size from from ponds in public parks to the Pacific Ocean – along with family lives and stories, relationships, elegiac memories, works of art and music, and sharp-eyed observations of everyday Tokyo.

The book also explores forms from various traditions, including the ghazal from the Middle East and Indian subcontinent, Japanese haibun, haiku, and senryu, as well as the soneto, a new fourteen-line form based on various traditional Japanese forms.

 

June 2024. 84 pages. 210 x 148 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-47-8 (paperback).

Click here to read an excerpt from this book.

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RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Iain Maloney: Mountain Retreats

Mountain Retreats, Iain Maloney’s third poetry collection, consists of two poetic cycles in the tradition of the great climbing poets, Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth. Where the sky begins ranges over peaks and valleys exploring the connections between nature and health as the narrative voice retreats into the Japanese Alps while facing an unnamed illness. All of this has happened before uses the mechanisms of the rock cycle – weathering and erosion – to come to terms with mortality. Drawing on an array of imagery and references, these poems strike out in new directions before looping back on themselves, rising and falling like mountain trails, all the while seeking clarity above the trees, where the sky begins.

I think this might be my favourite book Maloney has written ever. The number of times I found I was holding my breath whilst reading this ; I love its honesty and the feeling of guidance that streams through it. Tactile, elemental and pin-sharp poetry that strips both body and landscape back to the very bones. Maloney folds time and presses it into your palm, whispering go, breathe, be. – Larissa Reid

January 2024. 78 pages. 210 x 148 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-46-1 (paperback).

Click here to read a PDF excerpt from this book.

There’s a great review of Mountain Retreats by T. Y. Garner in the Glasgow Review of Books:

A MAP FOR TOUGH TIMES: On Iain Maloney’s ‘Mountain Retreats’

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Eric Selland: Brushwork

Brushwork consists of a selection of pages from Eric Selland’s recent notebooks, featuring abstract works done with calligraphic brush. Many of these pieces can stand as individual works, but they are actually part of a whole, often framing, or framed by, text written with black-ink pen, so that the notebook itself functions as a work in its own right.

Eric Selland writes: “In recent years the notebook has become the primary focus of my writing. Part of this comes from a questioning of the concept of the completed work, the ‘product,’ as being more important than the process – as if writing were merely an inconvenience to be borne as a means of reaching the goal of a finished work, which is then packaged and sold. I share this concern with a number of poets who approach writing as a daily practice. Here there is less emphasis on the final product and more on process. At the same time, however, I realize that I’m moving in two different directions at once : the conceptual or ideal relationship to language and thought in the form of daily writing, and the understanding of language in its materiality, where the written word becomes an object or shape in a visual work.” (From the introduction)

September 2023. 88 pages. 210 x 148 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-44-7 (paperback).

Click here to see a PDF excerpt from this book.

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Sanki Saitō: The Kobe Hotel: Memoirs

Translated and with an introduction and notes by Masaya Saito

Sanki Saitō: Selected Haiku 1933–1962

Translated and with an introduction and notes by Masaya Saito

Sanki Saitō is a towering figure in twentieth-century haiku. Although he did not begin to write haiku until the age of 33, he then rapidly became a leading figure in the poetically radical New Rising Haiku movement. He was silenced in 1940 when his writing caused him to be arrested on the charge of violating the Peace Preservation Law, but he began to write again after 1945, and between 1948 and 1962 he published three major collections of  haiku: A Peach at Night (1948), Today (1952) and Metamorphoses (1962). Vigorous, earthy, observant, tragic, hilarious, sensuous, unillusioned, powerful, ironic – these haiku are among the major achievements in postwar Japanese poetry.

In Selected Haiku 1933–1962, Masaya Saito has vividly and powerfully translated 1,141 of Sanki’s haiku. In addition he has written a full and informative introduction, outlining Sanki’s life, describing his key role in the New Rising Haiku movement of the 1930s, elucidating the political and historical context in which he wrote, and discussing his mature postwar work.

Haiku, this oddball. Short and small, unfree, difficult, and its attractiveness supreme,’ began Sanki Saito’s account of his involvement with the world’s shortest verse form. Here Masaya Saito (no relation) has translated a selection of well over a thousand haiku of Sanki, illuminating the kaleidoscopic aspects of Sanki’s art. – Hiroaki Sato

An important poet deserving of this new exhaustive translation, made eminently more accessible by Masaya Saito’s painstaking biography. Often his own worst enemy, Sanki’s haiku plumb the depths of a turbulent, iconoclastic life during Japan’s embrace of modernity and war. – Paul Miller, editor, Modern Haiku

At a time when English-language haiku is exploring new directions in form and content,  these fresh translations of Sanki’s haiku remind us that the seasons and their manifestations are, as he puts it, ‘nothing but the outermost layer of the truth of actual existence,’ and that it is the purpose of all haiku ‘to immerse ourselves deep in the truth of actual being.’ – Lee Gurga, editor, Modern Haiku Press

May 2023. 296 pages. 9 x 6 in/229 x 152 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-43-0 (paperback).

Click here to download a PDF of some pages from this book – haiku from the immediate postwar period, 1945 and 1946.

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‘There are many ways to approach this rich collection of Sanki’s work, perhaps the largest number of haiku by any modern Japanese haiku poet yet translated. It is a fine achievement, and clearly it has been Masaya Saito’s avocation to undertake it.…It is a magnificent collection.’– David Burleigh in Modern Haiku.

Simon Collings has published a review of Sanki in Litter, in which he says that ‘Sanki’s haiku, full of acute observation, emotional directness and humour, speak for themselves and are the best recommendation for why he deserves our attention.’ Click here to read the whole review.

 

Peter Makin: Tre Paesi & Other Poems

Following Neck of the Woods, this is Peter Makin‘s second book for Isobar. Tre Paesi and Other Poems: Three wanderings in compacted time and space, through North Kyoto, Cumbria and Lincolnshire : moving without pause and without announcement between past and present, this season and the next. It is an old man’s poem, mainly about regret for what he did not live up to . The speaker is one who tends to think his thoughts through what he sees : one who might admire Caliban’s knowledge of what’s in front of his nose, his ability to identify with its movements.

 

 

Billy Mills has posted his latest report on his recent reading, including a fine review of Tre Paesi and Other Poems. He stresses the ecological concerns of the poems, and comments that “Makin’s perceptions of place are conveyed through an acute focus on detail” and that his use of language “evokes both Pound and Bashō” in that “details are presented not as metaphor but as a means of understanding the world”. He concludes: “These poems are a vital addition to the long tradition of bringing together English-language modernism and Japanese haiku. An essential read.” You can read the whole review here if you scroll down a little.

Praise for previous work by Peter Makin:

Mary de Rachewiltz on Ato : The elegance ! The sheer stark black on white elegance – that such precision could hold so much sorrow – a wonder….

Robert Creeley on ‘Hagoromo’ (included in Neck of the Woods): Its scale, its pace, its articulate detailing, literally its feeling, are all to me very, very effective. It’s a solid and beautiful piece of work, intimate and ageless.

Timothy Harris ( in PN Review ) on Neck of the Woods : I am not convinced that language, or any artistic medium, is transparent in the way Ford, Pound, and Bunting seem to have hoped it was, but what surely can be transmitted by the kind of verse they advocate is, as Makin suggests, not so much the world itself as an attentiveness to it, an attentiveness that because it is reticent and resolutely unsentimental can … be profoundly moving. It is the quality of attention in Makin’s poems that makes them so good.

August Kleinzahler on Neck of the Woods: Peter Makin’s precision in describing natural settings and phenomena, from the coast of Lincolnshire to Kyoto, either with the breadth of distance or as if through a magnifying glass, is remarkable in itself; but in the selection, ordering and juxtaposition of subject matter Makin manages to combine the eye of the scientist, the compositional acumen of the Zen-inspired painters of the Sengoku era and the sensibility of a traditional Japanese poet of tanka and haiku.… This is very moving poetry.

February 2023. 52 pages. 8.5 x 5.5/216 x 140 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-42-3 (paperback).

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Rin Ishigaki: This Overflowing Light: Selected Poems

Selected and translated by Janine Beichman

Born in central Tokyo in 1920, Rin Ishigaki was one of the most daring and gifted poets of Japan’s postwar cultural renaissance. She knew Japan before the war, during it, and afterwards, saw it move from hubris to disastrous defeat – which included the destruction of her family home during one of the worst firebombings of Tokyo in 1945 – to restoration into the community of nations. Her poetry is witness to this history as seen from her own specific viewpoint, that of a single woman working in a bank as the only support for her six-member family, at first engaged in labor union activities, but later moving to a politically more independent position. Her down-to-earth understanding of the politics of family and the workplace, helped to create her reputation as a writer of ‘life poetry’ and as a poet of resistance, but this combines with a matter-of-fact, unsentimental, and often humorous intimacy with the ordinary creatures and things of the world, whether animal, vegetable or mineral, to shed an almost other-worldly light over some of the poems, even though they speak in tones and about subjects refreshingly earthy and earthly. This Overflowing Light: Selected Poems reflects all these various aspects of her work throughout her career.

Janine Beichman’s skilled and deeply sympathetic translations capture Ishigaki’s breadth and depths in English, from the early postwar political poems and cries for freedom from family ties all the way to the late poems in which she contemplates her own death. ‘How else,’ she asked, ‘could you write poetry except from your own life?’

August 2022. 120 pages. 8.5 x 5.5. ISBN 978-4-907359-41-6 (paperback).

‘My house is small but the living is heavy,’ writes Ishigaki, one of Japan’s most important and widely read mid-twentieth-century poets. In this exquisitely translated collection of sometimes simple, sometimes surreal, yet always striking poems, Ishigaki struggles in her cramped corner of the world to carve out her own place as a woman, socially conscious poet, idealist, and dreamer. In the process, she lightens our load too, teaching us how to live.  – Jeffrey Angles, author of Watashi no hizukehenkōsen (My International Date Line)

We were hungrily waiting for this collection of poems by one of the most important and beloved modern Japanese poets, Ishigaki Rin. Beginning with ‘Greetings’ and ending with ‘Good Night’, the collection tells us a story – sad, brutal but humorous and empowering – of a girl-daughter-mature woman, socially aware and working hard to support her dependent and ailing family while also presenting a rich feast of both celebrated poems and less well-known yet interesting, engaging, and powerful pieces: Fruits which no country / has ever grown / Splendid banquets / whose recipes no chef knows (from ‘Festival of the Blind’).  –  Tomoko Aoyama, author of Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature.

If you look into the history of Japanese free verse poetry until now it’s clear that male poets, who were still the mainstream when Ishigaki was writing, had (and still have) no interest in pots or pans or toilets or the other down to earth things that Ishigaki Rin writes about. There are women poets now, including me, who write poems about such things. Different as her world was from ours, Ishigaki Rin, poet of resistance, is the mother of us all. – Ito Hiromi, author of Killing Kanoko and The Thorn Puller.

One of the many insights in ‘Towards a Speculative Poetics of Translation: Janine Beichman’s Translation from Japanese of Ishigaki Rin’s This Overflowing Light: Selected Poems’ by James Garza is when he points out that Beichman ‘seems to approach translation as an embodied reader – a reader who does not simply “access” the text … from a position of distant mastery, but who is capable of being moved and changed by the source text, and who constructs the target text in the still “warm” affective space of that experience. The target-language words are somehow picked up and put together differently than if someone were to pick them up “cold”.’ Click here to read the whole review in Reading in Translation.

Click here to read a PDF extract from this book.

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Philip Rowland: An Open Parenthesis

Like Philip Rowland’s previous collection, Something Other Than Other (2016), An Open Parenthesis gathers short poems into meticulously arranged sequences. Although the book is striking in its minimalism, it is not programmatically so: rather, it flexibly interweaves themes of city life, parenthood and poetics through a series of nine sections that can in the end be read as one long, book-length work. While drawing on the poet’s notable engagement with the haiku tradition, this collection moves into new areas and – as the title suggests – into a new openness and open-endedness.

 

Few poets writing now, or even ever, get so much out of so little. Every word is weighed and placed, each poem an experience on the page and in the mind, immediately resonant, clear of clutter, looking outwards, hearing inwards. And what do we get out of it? Real and yet never forced or overdetermined insight. Poems of parenthood. The urban observation Charles Reznikoff would have written had he travelled the Tokyo public transport system rather than New York’s. And it’s not all just the concrete and minimal – the abstract and expansive have their place too. It’s hard to keep up with everything that’s worthwhile in the world of poetry, but An Open Parenthesisis a book you really should get hold of. – Alistair Noon

An Open Parenthesis is a masterful book. I cannot think of when I last read anything so compelling. Zukofsky and Corman would admire his faithfulness to every word, his clean lines, and his discreet narrative of love and family.  – John Martone

Philip Rowland’s minimalist lines in An Open Parenthesis are still, close to subdued light & silence – ‘pausing to listen where the picture used to be’. There is an unusually strong sense of attentiveness, with composition registering the breath, such that ’the wait becomes / the destination’. – Peter Hughes

July 2022, 126 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 in / 140 x 210 mm, ISBN 978-4-907359-40-9

Click here to read an extract from this book.

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Robert Maclean: Wintermoon

In Wintermoon  Robert MacLean distils twenty-five years of living in Kyoto, Japan, into a single seasonal cycle seen through the radically minimalist lens of haiku. Here are 119 precise instants of focus, divided into eleven sequences – ‘stepping stones / leading to / a waterfall’. Each set of poems arrives at an awareness different from the one with which the set began, and the book as a whole maps a transformative journey filled with Zen practice, loneliness, university teaching, questionings, cultural acclimation, intimate encounters with nature, romance and marriage, and the death of parents and of an unborn child. Each sequence is a record of a series of acute and vital perceptions of the world.

[Cover image: Tsuki (Moon) by Sarah Brayer: sarahbrayer.com]

Robert MacLean’s haiku are to the haiku of Bashō and Buson as Rilke’s sonnets are to the sonnets of Petrarch and Leopardi. They step back and forth across the rules (which don’t work in the English language anyway) but adhere with grace and vigor to the principles. Principles aren’t rules; they’re something better: insights, visions, even, at the best of times, enlightened realizations. – Robert Bringhurst

Beautifully laid out, and at times tremendously moving, the haiku in Wintermoon are allowed to breathe in a way that matches the practice of meditation that is one of its themes. Ranging from classic, Zen-like simplicity to bold, surrealistic imagery, but with a light touch throughout, they consistently sound a ‘harmonic / of a deeper tuning’.  – Philip Rowland

Just a breath of words. But when I look, they disappear into the ink, taking me with them. Note to readers : keep fireflies in pocket. – Red Pine

March 2022, 84 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 in / 140 x 210 mm, ISBN 978-4-907359-39-3

Click here to read an extract from this book.

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Taylor Mignon (ed.): VOU: Visual Poetry, Tokio, 1958–1978

Taylor Mignon has lived in Tokyo for many years, and during that time he has built up an important collection of copies of the avant-garde magazine VOU, edited by the legendary Kitasono Katue. Although the magazine, originally founded in 1935, had long included visual images (the earliest one reproduced here dates from 1958), in the decade or so before Kitasono’s death in 1978, the magazine became notable for the amount and quality of visual poetry it printed. VOU: Visual Poetry, Tokio, 1954–1978 is Taylor’s selection of work by nine leading contributors, along with his commentary on the poets and Eric Selland’s introduction placing the work in its historical, cultural and political context.

From Eric Selland‘s Introduction to the book: This long-overdue publication fills a gap in the understanding of postwar Japanese poetry and the role of visual poetry in the avant-garde of Japan’s postwar period. It is a highly welcome book.  The VOU Club was a group of outsider poet-artists with their roots in Japan’s Modernist avant-garde of the 1930s who were an active part of Japan’s tumultuous 1960s and 1970s.…The work included in this selection has been cared for and preserved by Taylor Mignon and a handful of other people without whose efforts it would have fallen into oblivion.  It is hoped that this publication will bring about more awareness of Japan’s dynamic experimental tradition in poetry during the twentieth century.

ISBN: 978-4-907359-38-6, paperback 8 x 8 in (203 x 203 mm), 120 pages, January 2022

Click here to view an excerpt from VOU: Visual Poetry, Tokio, 1958–1978.

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Minoru Yoshioka: Kusudama, translated by Eric Selland

‘Kusudama. The classical meaning is a small perfumed pouch, the scent created through a mixing of herbs and flowers, but Yoshioka’s childhood memories would associate this word with brightly colored papier-mâché balls that were hung in the covered market places of prewar Tokyo, and which were placed in front of newly opened shops to attract customers. These kusudama were once a common sight in Tokyo, especially in Shitamachi, Tokyo’s lower-town neighborhood located along the Sumida River, where Yoshioka grew up. Several meanings converge in this word: the exotic pouch or grab-bag containing all manner of things; the teeming, crowded and very worldly market place; and embedded within kusudama we find kusuri (medicine), which can be taken in the same way as the Native American term – a kind of magic – and tama, which means gem or, with a different written character, spirit or soul.’ (From the translator’s afterword.

Minoru Yoshioka (1919-1990), the great late-modernist poet, published nine major collections between 1955 and 1984. After his second collection, Monks, won an important prize for younger poets in 1959, he was embraced by the avant-garde, and in the following years would influence a broad range of younger poets, including Kazuko Shiraishi and Takashi Hiraide. In the 1970s he began experimenting with appropriation and collage as a means of stepping outside his now well-established poetic language by ‘borrowing the voices of others.’ The culmination of these experiments is his magnum opus, Kusudama (1984), a multi-voiced collage of inner voices and quotations, here brilliantly translated by Eric Selland.

24 September 2021, 78 pages,8 x 8 in / 203 x 203 mm, ISBN 978-4-907359-37-9

A review of Kusudama by Simon Collings has been published online at Litter Magazine. The review captures the flavour of the book – intertextual, collage-like, mythical, erotic, paradoxical, linguistically sharp, down-to-earth – very well. Click here to read the whole review.

Billy Mills has also published a strong, insightful review of Kusudama – with sharply selected quotations from the poem – as part of his ‘Recent Reading November 2021’ on his blog Elliptical Movements. Click here to read the whole review (Kusudama is the last of the four books he discusses, so you’ll need to scroll down a bit).

Click here to read an extract from this book.

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Click here to read an extract from this book.

Click here to buy from Amazon in Japan, click here to buy from Amazon in the UK, click here to buy from Amazon in the US.

 

NEWS

Ian Brinton on Isobar Press in The London Magazine

Ian Brinton‘s article about Isobar Press has come out on The London Magazine website. He summarises the history of the press, and writes very generously about Isobar books by Paul Rossiter (From the Japanese), Andrew Fitzsimons (What the Sky Arranges), Peter Makin (Neck of the Woods), Saito Masaya (Snow Bones), Naka Tarō (Music: Selected Poems, translated by Andy Houwen and Chikako Nihei), and with mentions of Woman in a Blue Robe by Yoko Danno and The Day Laid Bare by Kiwao Nomura translated by Eric Selland. Click here to read the whole article.

 

PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED

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