Let Those Who Appear (review)

Shiraishi Kazuko was born in Vancouver, Canada, in 1931. Seven years later, she moved with her family to Japan, where the effects of World War ii made a deep impression on her. By the time she was seventeen, her talent as a poet was recognized by Kitasono Katsue, the great pioneering avant-garde poet who led the vou group of surrealist artists and poets. Later on she became independent of any coterie and in the early 1960s began reading her poetry to the accompaniment of experimental jazz. Shiraishi led a liberated lifestyle, overturning taboos against explicit sexual language and imagery long before the fiction writer Amy Yamada.

In 1973, Shiraishi was a guest writer at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She had already published five books in Japanese, and this experience broadened her view of the world. Indeed, she began to see herself as an international poet. Others saw her this way as well, and she was invited to perform her poetry worldwide. In 1978, New Directions, under Kenneth Rexroth's direction, published Shiraishi's first book of poems in English translation, Seasons of Sacred Lust. This new book contains poems from volumes published in Japanese between 1984 and 2000.

To fully appreciate the scope of Shiraishi's art, one must witness her live performances. She continues to experiment by fusing her poetry reading with the sounds of jazz, Ainu music, industrial trash cans, century-old water from an ancient iceberg, and shamisen, and with other media such as photography, video, Flamenco dance, and the butoh dance of Ohno Kazuo. It's not possible to understand Shiraishi's work without hearing her dramatic voice, which can be nearly frightening in its lilting power. However, Let Those Who Appear, a modestly thin, long-awaited publication, will give readers a hint of why Mishima Yukio said that she was the best poet in Japan, and Allen Ginsberg echoed this statement.

The breadth of Shiraishi's themes range from the warning of the dangers of technology, especially cloning (the opening poem "I and I"), the ironical criticism of virtual reality, to environmental concerns ("A Bear of the Human Family"), national identity ("The Laughing Cricket"), government control ("The Donkey Speculates"), the narrowing of the human heart ("The Residents of the Cocoon"), and sex ("Woodpecker"), just to name a few.

The translation team of Samuel Gromes and Yumiko Tsumura and New Directions have given us an accurate and respectable English rendering of the poems of Shiraishi Kazuko, one of the great artist-performer poets of our time.