Last week I discovered Japanese poet Nobuko Kimura, whose collection The Village Beyond happened to be sitting in the delightful mess on Monroe Avenue known as Rick’s Recycled Books. (Incidentally, congrats to Rick on City Newspaper’s 2008 Best of Rochester award in the category of Best Place to Pick Up ’80’s Movies on the Cheap.)
Anyway…The Village Beyond is filled with stunning surreal dreamscapes. The poet is quoted as saying, “A dream is not just a set of images but an actual experience.”
In an attempt to characterize Kimura’s work, poet Fujiwara Sadamu accurately writes, “The contents of her poems may be far more surrealistic than Surrealist poems, but they press upon the reader with an odd sort of realism and immediacy.”
These are the best poems I’ve read in a very long time. Absolutely original and gorgeous. My hat is off to you, Ms. Kimura, as well as to translator Hiroaki Sato.
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[...] year, I discovered a Japanese poet named Kimura Nobuko, whom I wrote briefly about here. I spent a great deal of time with her collection The Village Beyond, and was deeply moved by it. [...]
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