"The road of excess," said the English poet William Blake, "leads to the palace of wisdom," which might serve as an epigraph for this skillfully assembled, sharp and witty book about the drug-fueled quest of certain American poets for enlightenment in India in the 1960s. The sweetness of the whole experience came to Allen Ginsberg afterward so that "in his train seat on the Kyoto-Tokyo express, he wept." The overwhelming revelation was not after all the blue hand of Krishna, but "really a rather simple thought," remarks the author. And after the Beats, of course, there came the Beatles.
CHO-I / MESSAGE FROM BUTTERFLY, by Michio Nakahara. Translated by James Kirkup and Makoto Tamaki. Yuushorin, 250 pp., ¥3,000 (hardcover)
Half a century after his first arrival in Japan, the gifted and prolific English poet and translator James Kirkup passed away this year in Andorra, the mountain fastness to which he had retreated in later life with a Japanese companion, and where he continued to write. Though Kirkup was 91 when he died in May, contributions from his restless pen continue to appear in several journals, and this handsome bilingual collection of poems by an important living haiku poet carries the legend "Kirkup's last work": The hands that have stopped / writing resemble the wings / of a frozen crane.