The Penguin Book of Japanese Versecontains over 700 poems from the third century to the twentieth, including both tanka ('short poem') and haiku, and covering such classic themes as nature, love, partings and time.
Professor Geoffrey Bownas was born in 1923; he read Greats and
CHinese at Oxford and in 1952-4 studied with Professor Kaizuka
Shigeki in Kyoto University. He established Oxford's Department of
Japanese Studies in 1954, then became Sheffield University's
Founding Professor of Japanese Studies in 1966, pioneering the
combination of the study of Japanese with social sciences. His
publications include Japanese Rainmaking and Other Folk Practices,
New Writing in Japan with Mishima Yukio, Doing Business with the
Japanese with David Powers and Christopher Hood and Japanese
Journeys, Writings and Recolllections of a half century of direct
involvement with Japan.
Anthony Thwaite was born in 1930. After leaving Oxford in 1955 he
went to Tokyo University where he taught English Literature until
1957. He has frequently revisited Japan, holding a Japan Foundation
Fellowship in 1985-6, taking up a travelling scholarship in 1989,
and going to Japan on various lectures and tours over the years,
most recently in 2005. He has taught in Universities in Britain,
the U.S.A., Libya and elsewhere. He has published seventeen books
of poems, most recently Collected Poems (2007), holds honorary
doctorates from the Universities of Hull and East Anglia, and was
awarded an OBE for services to poetry in 1990.
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