Basho’s Ghost

Embodied among travel sketches and portraits of people and places visited during his 1988 stay in Japan on a Japan-U.S. Fellowship Sam Hamill presents a reading of Japanese poetry beginning with the eighteenth-century anthology Manyoshu tracing the development of the Japanese poetic imagination up through the seventeenth-century poet Bash the eighteenth-century monk/poet Ry kan and concluding with Japans first Mondernist poet Takamura Kotar . Visiting places in Japans north country where Bash traveled three hundred years ago Hamill drawns upon his own zen practice of twenty-five years and upon his lifelong study of Asian literature encountering some of Japans foremost poets introducing them as he would old friends met along a great journey. Bash s Ghost is a literary exegesis located in personal memoir a “deep reading” performed with translucent grace often poignant and always revealing. It is a true poets book a book of the heart.