We’d like to invite you to join Malvern’s Line/Break Poetry Book Club! Hosted by Malvernian Julie Poole, this is a reading group for those of you interested in exploring works from our expansive poetry section.

This month’s selection is On Lost Sheep by Japanese Modernist poet Shiro Murano (1901-1975), translated by Goro Takano.

In order to survive at all as a poet Murano had to cross the treacherous boundary of pre and postwar cultural ideologies —the latter just as guilty in its omissions as the earlier era was in its excess. Hence Murano’s realism is of necessity a tragic one. He believed that the poet writes from the night of the world in the face of the forgetting of Being. The task of the poet was to break free of this night. Murano summed up his poetics as a yearning for authentic Being. Goro Takano’s translations pass through this difficult terrain with painstaking care, reflecting the precision of the original while at the same time not shying away from allowing the strain of such a task to show through—a strain which we both know is more than merely a linguistic one. —Eric Selland

How it works:

Stop by Malvern Books to sign up and you’ll receive a 10% discount off the title! Read the book and then come to the meeting prepared with either a question or a specific poem to discuss with the group. We’ll look forward to seeing you at this meeting of our Line/Break Poetry Book Club!