Lindley Williams Hubbell (1901–1994) is one of the forgotten figures of twentieth-century American poetry.  After receiving a Yale Younger Poets Award in 1927, his work was published by several major U.S. publishers, but then in 1953 he moved to Japan and liked it so much that he never left again, becoming a Japanese citizen in 1960 and from then on publishing almost exclusively in Japan. He taught at Doshisha University in Kyoto and became an afficionado of nō theatre and a great fan of Japanese pop music.

In his sixty-year writing career he moved through several phases : in New York in the 1920s, he wrote short, finely cadenced lyrics ; by the 1940s he was producing substantial modernist works of great technical bravura ; after his arrival in Japan, he moved to a more anecdotal, often humorous mode. Yet, in spite of this stylistic odyssey, the voice in the poems is always recognisably his own. This Selected Poems reintroduces the work of an important and enjoyable poet, one who wrote equally well about urban life on Long Island and about the Japan he knew intimately during his forty-year residence there.

Hiroaki Sato: This generous selection from Lindley Williams Hubbell’s poetic œuvre illustrates his change – from youthful lyrics speaking of love and death, to the history of man and land over millions of years, to the wonderment at small things in daily life, to something akin to Prospero’s farewell to magic.  All the while he never let go of poetry as a form of art, applying couplets, quatrains, sonnets, sestinas, double sestinas, wherever they fit, as he revealed his casual erudition in angelology, archeology, craniology, geography, oceanography and, most profoundly, art, whether verbal or visual.

Lindley Hubbell, my teacher of poetry sixty years ago, in Kyoto, richly deserves the tribute of this Selected Poems three decades after his death, with the poet Paul Rossiter’s scholarly, full-length introduction.

May 2025. 264 pages. 9 x 6 in/229 x 152 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-50-8 (paperback).

Billy Mills has written a long and detailed review of the two Hubbell volumes: ‘Once again, I am indebted to Isobar, and Paul Rossiter, for broadening my knowledge of poetry, never having read Hubbell before. I share his hope that these books will bring him to a wider readership. Hubbell may not rank as a ‘major’ poet, but very few do. However, his body of work as represented here is significant, and forms an interesting extension to the story of American modernist poetry, particularly its relationship with Japan, which he extends beyond the boundaries of what might roughly be termed the Beat tradition. And in Long Island Triptych he wrote one of the more interesting mid-length poems of the mid-century period. Read him.’ Click here to read the whole review.