Description: Kiwao Nomura is the leading experimental voice in contemporary Japanese poetry. This translation of The Day Laid Bare is the first time one of his individual volumes has been translated into English.
Brief description: Kiwao Nomura (1951-) is the leading experimental voice in contemporary Japanese poetry. He is also a major critic and theorist, who, along with Shuri Kido, has been responsible for providing a whole new interpretation of Japan's postwar period in literature. He has also written on French poets, including a book-length analysis of Rimbaud as seen through the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari. He has published twenty-six volumes of verse since 1987 and translated the complete poems of René Char into Japanese. In September 2020 the Japan Poets Association awarded him their 38th Modern Poetry Prize for his 2019 volume Twilight Saudade.
Review Quotes:
Kiwao Nomura is a thrillingly unpredictable poet who never fails to challenge the limits of the possible and the linear. If indeed, as Pound wrote many years ago, certain poetry can resemble a "dance of the intellect among words," then we might think of Nomura's work as a kind of tarantella, or perhaps a sword dance, or flamenco dance, or a rice dance. Satan tango? Quick step? Moon walk? Fire dance? Perhaps all, since Nomura is a poet of international range and address, a poet for whom the body of the poem is constantly dissolving and reforming in its path toward discovery of that sublime engine of perception, the ungovernable imagination.
Michael Palmer (author of The Laughter of the Sphinx)
Kiwao Nomura's The Day Laid Bare came in the aftermath of the 2011 devastation caused by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Now Eric Selland's new translation is able to speak to our world a decade later too. The writing registers and confronts a sense of existential crisis, danger and destruction with startling vitality. The 'flesh' of Nomura's poems-a recurrent term-is related to every other life form on the planet with bleak intensity. Life is stripped back to bare bones which then beat out new rhythms to the ongoing necessities of dance. The desperation is knitted inextricably to a buoyant lilt, the lustrous and the filthy, shrieks and bird song. Violence, nonchalance, the dissolution of the human are conveyed in clashing registers which juxtapose diverse literary histories and cultures. This stunning book, an energising danse macabre for today, concludes with six pages of illuminating notes examining the workings and contexts of the text.
Peter Hughes