Ode to Stone

Coming from the country where short, concise poetry is celebrated, Hara Shiro's Ode to Stone is an unusually lengthy contribution to modern Japanese poetry. A recent winner of the Gendai Shijin Sho, this poem is regarded by some as having an epic quality that rivals some the great poetry of the twentieth-century West. The "narrator," stone, takes us to locations as diverse as Nagasaki, Paris, and Cairo, and to various times in history. It also directs us through a world of language, where style need not be that which is fashionable, unusual, or abstruse, but can be as ordinary and inconspicuous as the astonishing underside of the Nagasaki Eyeglasses Bridge.