"In the Ninth Decade" is Edith Shiffert's 11th poetry collection and the second she has published in her 80s. It is dedicated to her younger sister, who has just joined her as an octogenarian. The author was born in Canada in 1916, and came to Japan, following sojourns in Alaska and Hawaii, in 1963. She has lived in Kyoto ever since.
Shiffert is one of several American poets to have taken up residence in the ancient capital of Japan. She shares with them a deep interest in the aesthetic and philosophical traditions of the city. This volume, like two of its predecessors, is beautifully illustrated with traditional ink paintings by Kohka Saito, a renowned artist of the genre.
But it is for the poems that we read her, and here, too, the cultural influence of Japan is strongly felt. Shiffert has previously assembled collections of seasonal verses in the 5-7-5 syllabic form, very sensibly calling them "brief poems" in order to avoid disputes about what is or isn't haiku. But clearly haiku have provided the model for her poems. There are some in this book, too, and it ends with a sequence titled "Waka," the old name for the slightly longer verse form known as tanka.
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