From the editors of Zen Poems of China and Japan comes the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind to appear in English.

This collaboration between a Japanese scholar and an American poet has rendered translations both precise and sublime, and their selections, which span fifteen hundred years-from the early T'ang dynasty to the present day-include many poems that have never before been translated into English. Stryk and Ikemoto offer us Zen poetry in all its diversity: Chinese poems of enlightenment and death, poems of the Japanese masters, many haiku-the quintessential Zen art-and an impressive selection of poems by Shinkichi Takahashi, Japan's greatest contemporary Zen poet. With Zen Poetry, Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto have graced us with a compellingly beautiful collection, which in their translations is pure literary pleasure, illuminating the world vision to which these poems give permanent expression.