Overview

Lindley Williams Hubbell (1901-1994) is one of the forgotten figures of twentieth-century American poetry. After receiving a Yale Younger Poets Award in 1927, his work was published by several major U.S. publishers, but then in 1953 he moved to Japan and liked it so much that he never left again, becoming a Japanese citizen in 1960 and from then on publishing almost exclusively in Japan. He taught at Doshisha University in Kyoto and became an afficionado of nō theatre and a great fan of Japanese pop music.In his sixty-year writing career he moved through several phases  in New York in the 1920s, he wrote short, finely cadenced lyrics ; by the 1940s he was producing substantial modernist works of great technical bravura ; after his arrival in Japan, he moved to a more anecdotal, often humorous mode. Yet, in spite of this stylistic odyssey, the voice in the poems is always recognisably his own. This Selected Poems reintroduces the work of an important and enjoyable poet, one who wrote equally well about urban life on Long Island and about the Japan he knew intimately during his forty-year residence there.

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Reviews

This generous selection from Lindley Williams Hubbell's poetic oeuvre illustrates his change - from youthful lyrics speaking of love and death, to the history of man and land over millions of years, to the wonderment at small things in daily life, to something akin to Prospero's farewell to magic. All the while he never let go of poetry as a form of art, applying couplets, quatrains, sonnets, sestinas, double sestinas, wherever they fit, as he revealed his casual erudition in angelology, archeology, craniology, geography, oceanography and, most profoundly, art, whether verbal or visual.Lindley Hubbell, my teacher of poetry sixty years ago, in Kyoto, richly deserves the tribute of this Selected Poems three decades after his death, with the poet Paul Rossiter's scholarly, full-length introduction. - Hiroaki Sato

Author Information

Lindley Williams Hubbell (1901-1994) was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and was privately educated. From 1925 he worked as a reference librarian in the Map Room of the New York Public Library. His first two books, Dark Pavilion (1927) and The Tracing of a Portal (1931) were published by Yale University Press, the first of them receiving a Yale Younger Poets Award. He published two more books with major publishers in the U.S. before moving to Japan in 1953, where he taught at Dōshisha University in Kyoto, continued to write and to publish new poetry (with the Ikuta Press in Kobe), and became an aficionado of both nō theatre and Japanese pop music. He took Japanese citizenship (with the name Hayashi Shūseki) in 1960, and remained in Japan for the rest of his life. Paul Rossiter has published eleven books of poetry since 1995. After retiring from teaching in Tokyo, he founded Isobar Press, which specialises in publishing English-language poetry from Japan, and English translations of modernist and contemporary Japanese poetry. Yoko Danno is a Japanese poet who writes poetry solely in English. Her poems have appeared internationally in many journals and anthologies, both online and in print. Her recent books of poetry Trilogy and Hagoromo: A Celestial Robe (Ikuta Press, 2010), Aquamarine (Glass Lyre, 2014) and Woman in a Blue Robe (Isobar Press, 2016). Her translation, Songs and Stories of the Kojiki, a collection of creation myths, songs and historical narratives that were compiled in the eighth century in Japan, appeared from Red Moon Press in 2014. She lives in Kobe, where she runs the Ikuta Press.

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