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Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20th Century Master, edited by Takako Lento & Wayne Miller, 2011
This second volume in the Unsung Masters Series focuses on Tamura Ryuichi, a young rabble-rousing Japanese Modernist poet during the early years of World War II who was then profoundly affected by his experience serving on a gun emplacement to defend agains the American and Soviet invasion that never came. After the war, Tamura became a key member of the "Wasteland" poets, who were inspired in part by Westerners such as T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden and published Arechi (The Wasteland), a literary magazine that sought to chart a new course for Japanese poetry. Though he is little known in the U. S., Tamura is widely considered to be one of the most important Japanese poets of the 20th century.
This volume includes more than 40 pages of Tamura's poetry in translations by Christopher Drake, Takako Lento, and Marianne Tarcov, as well as essays on Tamura's work by Japanese writers Ooka Makoto, Ayukawa Nobuo, Tanikawa Shuntaro, and Yoshimasu Gozo, and American writers Christopher Drake, Takako Lento, Laurence Lieberman, Miho Nonaka, and Marianne Tarcov. Introduction by Wayne Miller.
Like other Unsung Masters Series volumes, Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20th Century Master is available through Small Press Distribution, Amazon, and other retailers.
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About the Series
Pleiades Press publishes one book a year through the Unsung Masters Series, each volume of which focuses on an important writer who has been unjustly neglected and/or whose work is currently out of print. In addition to a generous sample of creative work, every volume includes numerous essays on the writer’s work. Coming in 2012: a volume on short fiction writer Nancy Hale, edited by Dan Chaon & Phong Nguyen.
Unsung Masters Books are available free with a subscription to Pleiades or for $12.99 from Small Press Distribution.
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Dunstan Thompson: On the Life & Work of a Lost American Master, edited by D. A. Powell & Kevin Prufer, 2010
Largely unknown today, Dunstan Thompson was once one of the most celebrated young poets in America. Published during and shortly after WWII, his often harrowing, homoerotic poems—many set on the battlefields and in the hospitals of the European Theater—were compared favorably to the work of W. H. Auden, Hart Crane, and Dylan Thomas. Then, as far as the general public was concerned, Dunstan Thompson disappeared. In a series of essays, interviews, letters, and clippings, this book traces Thompson's journey from a wildly successful literary enfant terrible, through his strong Catholic reawakening, and into his later years as a writer of mature, meditative, largely unpublished poetry. The first volume in the Unsung Masters Series, this book also includes a generous selection of Thompson’s very best poetry.
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