Publisher's Synopsis
Embodied among travel sketches and portraits of people and places visited during his 1988 stay in Japan on a Japan-U.S. Fellowship, Sam Hamill presents a reading of Japanese poetry beginning with the eighteenth-century anthology, Man'yoshu, tracing the development of the Japanese poetic imagination up through the seventeenth-century poet Basho, the eighteenth-century monk/poet Ryokan, and concluding with Japan's first Mondernist poet, Takamura Kotaro. Visiting places in Japan's north country where Basho traveled three hundred years ago, Hamill drawns upon his own zen practice of twenty-five years, and upon his lifelong study of Asian literature, encountering some of Japan's foremost poets, introducing them as he would old friends met along a great journey. Basho's Ghost is a literary exegesis located in personal memoir, a "deep reading" performed with translucent grace, often poignant and always revealing. It is a true poet's book, a book of the heart.
