Written on the Sky

"A tiny perfect little book. It made us forget totally we were on a subway." -- Fukuda Chiyo-Ni, "I must have Kenneth Rexroth's translations from the Japanese at once!" -- William Carlos Williams "Rexroth was steeped in the world's spiritual and literary traditions, absorbing ideas and philosophy into his poetry all his life." "The best Japanese poetry gathered and translated by Rexroth, including poems by Haito Joso, Prime Minister Kintsune, and Matsuo Basho." -- Ray Gonzalez

Eliot Weinbergers books of literary essays include Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, The Ghosts of Birds, and Angels & Saints. His political writings are collected in What I Heard About Iraq and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is a translator of the poetry of Bei Dao and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. He was formerly the general editor of the series Calligrams: Writings from and on China and the literary editor of the Murty Classical Library of India. Among his many translations of Latin American poetry and prose are The Poems of Octavio Paz, Pazs In Light of India, Vicente Huidobros Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutias Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges Seven Nights and Selected Non-Fictions. He has been publishing with New Directions since 1975. Poet-essayist Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) was a high-school dropout, disillusioned ex-Communist, pacifist, anarchist, rock-climber, critic and translator, mentor, Catholic-Buddhist spiritualist and a prominent figure of San Francisco's Beat scene. He is regarded as a central figure of the San Francisco Renaissance and is among the first American poets to explore traditional Japanese forms such as the haiku.