On Lost Sheep

Author: Shiro Murano

Translator: Goro Takano

Publisher: Tinfish Press (2017)

Shiro Murano (1901-1975) was a Japanese Modernist poet, influenced by other poets from Basho to Rilke to T.S. Eliot. His poems fulfill Eliot's edict against personality, as they come at stark issues like death in non-autobiographical form. And yet there's tenderness here, where, "A poet's heart / [is] something like a dove / Still, under the branch / Something uncanny and alarming." This is Murano's first full-length book in English.