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Mountain Retreats, Maloney's third poetry collection, consists of two poetic cycles in the tradition of the great climbing poets, Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth. Where the sky begins ranges over peaks and valleys exploring the connections between nature and health as the narrative voice retreats into the Japanese Alps while facing an unnamed illness. All of this has happened before uses the mechanisms of the rock cycle - weathering and erosion - to come to terms with mortality. Drawing on an array of imagery and references, these poems strike out in new directions before looping back on themselves, rising and falling like mountain trails, all the while seeking clarity above the trees, where the sky begins.

Brushwork consists of a selection of pages from Eric Selland's recent notebooks, featuring abstract works done with calligraphic brush. Many of these pieces can stand as individual works, but they are actually part of a whole, often framing, or framed by, text written with black-ink pen, so that the notebook itself functions as a work in its own right.Eric Selland writes: "In recent years the notebook has become the primary focus of my writing. Part of this comes from a questioning of the concept of the completed work, the 'product,' as being more important than the process - as if writing were merely an inconvenience to be borne as a means of reaching the goal of a finished work, which is then packaged and sold. I share this concern with a number of poets who approach writing as a daily practice. Here there is less emphasis on the final product and more on process. At the same time, however, I realize that I'm moving in two different directions at once¿: the conceptual or ideal relationship to language and thought in the form of daily writing, and the understanding of language in its materiality, where the written word becomes an object or shape in a visual work." (From the introduction)

The Kobe Hotel is a revised edition, with an informative new introduction, of Masaya Saito's translations of Sanki Sait¿'s Kobe and Kobe Sequel, originally published by Weatherhill in 1993. Written by the leading figure of the New Rising Haiku movement, these prose pieces were serialized in haiku journals in the 1950s as a record of Sanki's experience of wartime and its aftermath.In 1942, having been silenced by the Special Higher Police, Sanki left Tokyo for Kobe, where he remained for the rest of the war. From his arrival in the city until its almost complete destruction in the fire bombing of 1945, he lived in a run-down hotel along with a diverse community of cosmopolitan lodgers - White Russian, Egyptian, Tartar, Korean, Taiwanese - all of them eking out a hand-to-mouth wartime existence, as were the dozen or so Japanese bar hostesses also living in the hotel. Sanki observed all these people with an alert and sympathetic eye. As he wrote in Kobe Sequel, 'Like them, I too believed that freedom, and nothing else, was the highest reason for living.' These memoirs, full of vigor, tragedy, sympathy and humor, are a tribute to ordinary people living freely despite Japan at that time being a police state engaged in total war. As the famous novelist and essayist Itsuki Hiroyuki wrote in his blurb for the initial publication of these memoirs in book form in1975¿: 'I have no doubt that this is a masterpiece which will remain in the history of Sh¿wa-era literature.'

Tre Paesi: Three wanderings in compacted time and space, through North Kyoto, Cumbria and Lincolnshire¿: moving without pause and without announcement between past and present, this season and the next. It is an old man's poem, mainly about regret for what he did not live up tö. The speaker is one who tends to think his thoughts through what he sees¿: one who might admire Caliban's knowledge of what's in front of his nose, his ability to identify with its movements.

An anthology of late twentieth-century Japanese visual poetry from Kitasono Katue's legendary VOU magazine, with a historical introduction and profiles of the individual poets.