ON TWO SHORES

New and Selected Poems

 

by

 

Matsuo Takahashi

 

Daedalus Press/Dufour Editions

Chester Springs PA 19425

 

Paper, 126 pages, $18.95

ISBN 1-904556-49.3

 

 

On Two Shores is the poetic record of Matsuo Takahashi s journey from the shores of Japan to the shores of Ireland. The author of eight collections of haiku and tanka, more than twenty volumes of free verse, and Japan s foremost gay playwright and poet, Takahashi s poems in this translation were written in Ireland in 1999 on a trip that caused him to regain his faith in poetry. Now almost 70 years of age, he is a cosmopolitan and traditionalist, as at home with contemporary free lines as he is with old theatrical forms such as Noh and Kyogen.

Poetry, Takahashi says, grants us a forum where we are allowed to have a dialogue with people who died a thousand years ago. This allows us to connect not only with the past but also the future, for the dead help the living write. And there is much here about death, and the end of the world, such as this from Morning:

One morning, you open your front door, and find

the world has ended.

 

This jarring of our senses becomes even more abstract in Courier:

 

Under a halo of morning light, a courier-bike

arrives backward without a sound.

The end of the world must be as bright,

blinding us in a single glar.

 

From here Takahashi takes a page from DesCartes and questions our very existence, as if only what we might perceive right now is all that exists, and even what seems to exist now is a large question, as in The Letter:

You who wrote the letter

are a light-source that ceased with the letter.

And I, reading the letter today,

am an eye that didn t exist then.

The essence of a letter between

a non-existent light source

and a non-existent eye

is light transmitted through darkness.

 

Yet Takahashi does not forego hope, or faith, or a belief in what might exist in death. He sees such a world like a tree with roots and leaves, even if is a mystery. In The Olive Tree he explains:

One of these days, death will pay us a visit,

and we ll join the serried ranks of the dead.

Siphoned-in by slender roots, we ll be reborn

and flow out of the shimmering leaves as light.

That much we know.

 

These poems are wide-ranging, from Yeats and Ezra Pound, from the Sarin terrorist attack on the Tokyo subway to 9/11, and how our arrogant stock exchange swelled up and sucked two iron birds into its twin towers of Babel ( To the Terrorists, Ezra Pound ), to the nightwalker who walks alone on one dark shore while sensing, in the waves, somewhere beyond the wind, the far shore from which he came, so that the sea and shore kept changing places. ( On Two Shores )

A bilingual edition, with translations by Mitsuko Ohno and Frank Sewell, this work of Takahashi is a type of metaphysical illumination that poetry might often strive to be but rarely is. Perhaps, as in Ebola, it is because Takahashi recognizes that the origin of what might kill us, such as a virus, is something which is ancient, as ancient as our source is invisible. But of course he means more than a virus when he says:

Huddled closely together, with nothing dividing us,

our voice lowered to a whisper,

we flow under the skin of time

on a dark riverbed.

 

The darkness Takahashi sees may not be what we want to see, but we live deeper for having seen it the way he does, if only briefly.

 

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