Awards

• Winner of Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award (Poetry) 2003

Overview

Influenced by the Chinese and Japanese masters, Hamill’s Dumb Luck affirms his ability to give us back the world and all its vicissitudes. Here you will find Zen fables, elegies and haiku, bluesy riffs, and poems that celebrate births, marriages, the liberating exile of the poet, as well as verses that present the dumb luck that has peppered the poet’s life. Sam Hamill is the author of a dozen volumes of original poetry, as well as three collections of essays. He is the Founding Editor of Copper Canyon Press, director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, and contributing editor at The American Poetry Review.

Full Product Details

9781929918256

Table of Contents

Reviews

From BooklistHamill has been deservedly praised for founding Copper Canyon Press, that excellent poetry publisher, and translating a lot of classical Greek, Chinese, and Japanese poetry and Taoist philosophy into vivid American English. His original poetry has been less acclaimed but shouldn't be ignored. Parts 1, 3, and 4 in this book show him in three different metiers--as a scholar of Far Eastern literature, as a late-middle-aged man, and as a person in the midst of life, surveying his past and hailing others' futures (e.g., in several wedding poems). Of course, his three spheres of activity overlap, and the wisdom of great Taoist, Confucian, and Zen masters crops up throughout the book, as do consciousness of his age and incidents from his particular life. Part 2 includes translations of the twelfth-century Japanese Buddhist nature poet Saigyo Hosho and two original haiku. Distinguishing everything here are a diction and a style that are utterly relaxed and companionable--like a brook trickling through a Buddhist garden, and just as restorative. Ray Olson

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