This celebration of what is perhaps the most influential of all poetic forms takes haiku back to its Japanese roots, beginning with poems by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters Basho, Busson, and Issa, and going all the way up to the late twentieth century to provide a survey of haiku...

Haiku, the Japanese form of poetry written in three short lines, is celebrated for its ability to express a simple moment in a profound way. The “haiku moment,” as it is called, refers to a heightened awareness of the world around us and how, in that small, transient period, the...

Haiku, the Japanese form of poetry written in just three lines, can be miraculous in its power to articulate the profundity of the simplest moment—and for that reason haiku can be a useful tool for bringing us to a heightened awareness of our lives. Here, the poet Patricia Donegan shares...

The poetry selected for this volume comes from the Tang Dynasty (618–907), an era when the influence of Buddhism was at its strongest in China. The best loved and most influential of all Chinese poems come from this period.

Like all books in the Shambhala Calligraphy series, In Love...

Incredible Good Fortune is Ursula K. Le Guin's sixth collection of poems, spanning the years 2000 to 2005. These poems by the celebrated author of Always Coming Home and The Language of the Night showcase Le Guin's many facets as a writer. Passionate, humanitarian, and...

These warm, funny, and eloquent poems, spanning the years 2000 to 2005, by the celebrated author of Always Coming Home and The Language of the Night,showcase Le Guin’s many facets as a writer.

"Love is a stranger and speaks a strange language," wrote Rumi, one of the world's most beloved mystical poets. His poems of spiritual love still speak directly to our hearts after more than seven hundred years. These classic selections contemplate separation and longing, intoxication...

Drawn from classical, medieval, and modern sources—including the imperial collections of the Manyoshu and Kokinshu—the poems in this collection are some of the greatest love poems from the Japanese tradition. The poems range in tone from the spiritual longing of an isolated...

Although alone, the lover is never lonely,
Forever hidden with the Beloved.

Love is the meaning of our existence, the raw material of transformation, the glorious way of access to Divine intimacy. This teaching infuses the lyric verse of Rumi (1207–1273), the greatest...

Here is more of the thrilling verse of the thirteenth-century Sufi saint, in translations that combine unsurpassed beauty with rigorous accuracy. Helminski and Rezwani’s translations stand out not only for their poetic eloquence, but for their faithfulness to the Persian originals (a rare...

A mudra is a symbolic gesture or action that gives physical expression to an inner state. This book of poetry and songs of devotion, written by Chögyam Trungpa between 1959 and 1971, is spontaneous and celebratory. This volume also includes the ten traditional Zen oxherding pictures...

Here is the most complete single-volume collection of the writings of one of the great luminaries of Asian literature. Basho (1644–1694)—who elevated the haiku to an art form of utter simplicity and intense spiritual beauty—is best known in the West as the author of Narrow Road...

Basho is best known in the West as the author of Narrow Road to the Interior, a travel diary of linked prose and haiku that recounts his journey through the far northern provinces of Japan. This volume includes beautiful Japanese-style illustrations by Stephen Addiss.

No other Asian poetic form has so intrigued and beguiled the English-speaking world as the Japanese haiku. Even before World War I such imagist poets as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and John Gould Fletcher were experimenting with the form. At that time, Pound well described the haiku as "an intellectual...

The hermit-monk Ryokan, long beloved in Japan both for his poetry and for his character, belongs in the tradition of the great Zen eccentrics of China and Japan. His reclusive life and celebration of nature and the natural life also bring to mind his younger American contemporary, Thoreau. Ryokan's...