The Japanese poet-scholar John Solt is perhaps best known in the United States for his excellent biocritical study (Harvard, 1999) of the avant-garde poet Kitasono Katue, who served, from the mid-1930s on, as Ezra Pound's primary conduit to the stylization of Japanese poetics that he so admired. “Kit Kat,” as Pound fondly called the poet he knew only via their extensive correspondence, was Pound's translator, editor, and sometime collaborator; in return, Pound (who did not read Japanese) wrote admiringly of Katue's work in Guide to Kulchur and elsewhere.
Solt has now published a beautifully produced volume of his own distinctive poetry—a poetry that fuses the concision of Japanese tanka and haiku with very up-to-date explorations of what Pound called moeurs contemporaines: riddling short lyrics laced with humor and a telling irony that makes the reader smile with a shock of recognition. In the spirit of Kenneth Rexroth, with whom...
