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A collection of lyrical poems that weave dreamlike imagery with everyday and mythic scenes. The poems move between enchanted woods, haunted gardens, village interiors and symbolic tableaux, using vivid sensory language—moonlight, apples, flowers, purple pall—to examine longing, loss, desire, and memory. Some pieces adopt songlike forms and short lyric units; others are narrative sketches evoking funerary rites, domestic rituals, and moments of feminine reflection. Recurrent motifs of time, mourning, and the uncanny create a tapestry of mood shifts from playful to elegiac, inviting readers to linger in symbolic moments rather than in continuous narrative.
*“‘Hokku’ (seventeen-syllable poem) in Japanese mind might be compared with a tiny star, I dare say, carrying the whole sky at its back. It is like a slightly-open door, where you may steal into the realm of poesy. It is simply a guiding lamp. Its value depends on how much it suggests.”
(Yone Noguchi, from The Pilgrimage,
published by Elkin Mathews, London, Eng.)