A House By Itself: Selected Haiku of Shiki
TRANSLATORS
John Brandi and Noriko Kawasaki Martinez
Last year's dream
I wake to this year's
reality
Reviews
"Shiki's distinctive vision and direct expression make a tone recognizably his own, conveyed beautifully in these pages' translations. We hear Shiki's haiku as the voice of a friend bringing complex news in a few intimate words. These haiku are drawn from a world that feels close to our own, and they bring our own lives and world closer. Shiki's poems are necessary and delicious as mountain water, carrying the mountain's hidden minerals from inside it to inside us."
– Jane Hirshfield, author of The Heart of Haiku and The Ink Dark Moon
John Brandi (b. Los Angeles, 1943) grew up in California, whose coast, mountains and deserts impacted his early life. After graduating from Cal State Northridge (1965), he worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer with Quechua farmers in the Ecuadorian Andes. In 1971 he moved to New Mexico, where he still resides. A recipient a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, he is an ardent traveler, with dozens of publications issued at home and abroad. Recent books include: The Way to Thorong La (Empty Bowl Press), The Great Unrest (White Pine Press) and Into the Dream Maze, limited-edition haibun poems with hand-colored drawings (Palace Press, Santa Fe). In 2017 he received a Touchstone Distinguished Book Award for A House By Itself: Selected Haiku of Masaoka Shiki (White Pine Press). Brandi has made a living on his craft: teaching, lectures on poetry, haiku and the spirit of travel, and by assisting students in writing programs abroad.