A Great Valley Under the Stars is the first book of poetry by Royall Tyler, the award-winning translator of The Tale of Genji and The Tale of the Heike.

Royall Tyler writes: ‘Distilled from notes and pages written decades ago in the New Mexico desert and during Midwestern winters, this suite moves from listening for the voice of the worthless – trash, stones, men in the least of places – to a vision of a great valley under the stars, the spell of love, and the music of the sky. It is all one.’

Intimate and expansive, moving from a truckstop in the New Mexico desert to its counterpart in the world of the Japanese sacred, from intensely realised prose to prayerful poems of love, A Great Valley Under the Stars is a work of maturest reflection and consummate skill, a lifetime in the making, and worth the wait.  – Andrew Fitzsimons

This is a delightful and lovely book – at once spare and lyrical, whimsical and profound.  I have been grateful for Royall Tyler’s splendid translations for years, but I am every bit as grateful now to have read him writing entirely in his own voice. – David Bentley Hart

Royall Tyler’s poems, at once earthy and subtle, intensely responsive to all the world holds, far and near, resonate singly and together in the mind and heart: an act of magic. – Dianne Highbridge

February 2014. Paperback. 78 pages. 8.5 x 5.5. ISBN 978-4-907359-05-8

Click here to read a review of A Great Valley Under the Stars by Kris Kosaka in the Japan Times.

Click here to buy A Great Valley Under the Stars from the London Review Bookshop.

To buy A Great Valley Under the Stars from Amazon, click here for Amazon.co.jp, click here for Amazon.com, click here for Amazon.co.uk.