Isobar Press publishes poetry in English by Japanese and non-Japanese authors who live (or have lived) in Japan, or who write on Japan-related themes. Isobar also publishes English translations of modernist and contemporary Japanese poetry, and (occasionally) English translations of poetry in languages other than Japanese but which has a strong Japanese connection.
In London, Isobar books are available from the London Review Bookshop, 14 Bury Place, London WC1A 2JL, tel: 020 7267 9030.
In Tokyo, Isobar books are available from Books Kinokuniya Tokyo in Shinjuku (near Shinjuku station New South exit).
JUST PUBLISHED
James McGonigal and John Pazdziora: Glasgow–Tokyo Line
Shining a poetic light on daily life in two urban centres, Glasgow–Tokyo Line links Scottish and Japanese cultures, landscapes and orthographies in unexpected ways. Its co-authors, James McGonigal and John Pazdziora, interweave tradition and modernity, finding new perspectives on the ancient practice of renga through the 100-stanza hyakuin form. Here is mark-making of all kinds, from tracks in snow to email musing and immediacy. The languages of their domestic lives (American and Scottish English, Japanese and traditional Scots) carry the conversation forward with naturalness and verve.
A delightful collaboration between two fine poets, one Scottish, one American and living in Japan, sharing a deep love of haiku. Unfolding like an easy conversation between friends, the sequence flows back and forth, from Glasgow to Tokyo (and back), catching moments of insight, reflection, humour. They give new life to the ancient practice of renga, linked verse, embracing the further discipline of hyakuin, making a hundred poems. Technically adept, they display a richness of language and register, in English, Japanese and Scots. A fascinating and enjoyable piece of work (and play!) – Alan Spence, Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at Aberdeen University, and author of The Pure Land (2006), Night Boat (2013), and Mr Timeless Blyth (2023)
Unobtrusively observing the core conventions of renga while freely following the ‘scent’ from link to link, Glasgow-Tokyo Line draws the reader into its companionable conversation with refreshing naturalness and verve: ‘Window boxes sprout / green peppers in summer grass. / I didna plant that.’ Full of particulars made – often playfully – poignant in the resonant space of haiku, the varied cultural and linguistic dimensions of the text (lucidly glossed in the Notes) make this book innovative yet accessible in ways that should appeal to aficionados and a wider audience alike. Indeed, ‘Plump berries wait: wild, sweet.’ – Philip Rowland, Editor, NOON: journal of the short poem
Click here to read a sample of this book.
December 2025. 64 pages. 8.5 x 5.5 in/140 x 216 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-54-6 (paperback).
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FLOATING WORDS: Yoko Danno
Floating Words is the latest book by Yoko Danno. The first part consists of ‘Grace Notes’ – two short, graceful, renga-like sequences and a single haiku. This is followed by a series of longer poems featuring hungry, angry or compassionate gods and goddesses, draughts of pure lake water, green tea and wine, and dishes of ( among other things ) tofu, vegetables, sashimi and citrus-flavored miso. This section culminates in a powerful prose-poem concerning the loss of her son, who died young in a Himalayan mountaineering accident in 1986.
The second part of the book is a complete translation of the classic fifteenth-century hundred-link renga Minase Sangin Hyakuin by the poets Sōgi, Shōhaku and Sōchō, widely acknowledged to be the greatest masterpiece of the hyakuin genre. Yoko Danno has translated it following the syllabic count and has provided an introduction, notes, and helpful translations of the classic poems from the Imperial Anthologies that the three Minase poets are alluding to in their contributions to the sequence.
Click here to read a sample of this book.
December 2025. 64 pages. 8.5 x 5.5 in/140 x 216 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-55-3 (paperback).
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RECENTLY PUBLISHED
Minoru Yoshioka: Paul Klee’s Table and Other Books
(translated by Eric Selland)
Minoru Yoshioka (1919-1990), the great late-modernist poet, published nine major collections between 1955 and 1984. He was unique in that he was a poet of the postwar generation who continued writing under the influence of Japan’s prewar modernist tradition at a time when many Japanese poets had rejected this approach. Written in a time of much political and social turmoil, the poems are profoundly critical of the materialist values upholding Japan’s postwar middle class. Although Yoshioka was not politically active, this questioning can be seen coming through in his surrealist imagery, in the absurd tales in which he satirizes popular icons and images, in his narrative discontinuity, and in his extravagant disruptions of conventional meaning formation.
After his emergence in 1955 with the publication of Still Life, the first book translated here, Yoshioka went on to become the most influential poet of the Japanese avant-garde, while many of the major poets of the generation following him were profoundly influenced by both his work and his friendship. In Paul Klee’s Table and Other Books, six major collections published by Yoshioka between 1955 and 1980 are translated in their entirety by Eric Selland, thus bringing the important and influential work Yoshioka produced during the first two decades of his career to an English language readership for the first time.
Michael Palmer: It is indeed a pleasure to celebrate the appearance of this volume of Yoshioka’s singular and relentlessly exploratory work from the hand of his dedicated translator, Eric Selland. In Yoshioka’s floating world, threads of modernism and vanguardism conjoin, along with echoes of Butoh, to present a unique, and uniquely post-war Japanese, poetic experience. Here darkness and light, stillness and motion, the inner and the outer, play against one another in a constantly metamorphosing, consistently astonishing, dance of words.
Click here to read a sample of this book.
November 2025. 232 pages. 8 x 8 in/203 x 203 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-53-9 (paperback).
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NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems (Volume 2)
(edited by Philip Rowland)
NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems (Volume2) presents a selection from Issues 14 –27 of NOON: journal of the short poem, published online between 2019 and 2025. Assembled by editor Philip Rowland to form a renga-like sequence, it is a gathering of haiku and other poems that resonates in stimulating and unexpected ways. ‘Full of splintered richness’ ( as Jane Hirshfield has described the journal ), this volume will move and surprise while providing new perspectives on contemporary short-form poetry.
Click here to read a sample of this book.
Praise for Volume 1:
An anthology that registers as a single work … Philip Rowland’s editorial tour de force is an absolute must. – John Stevenson in Modern Haiku
If only more anthologies were as diverse and enriching as this one. Philip Rowland has identified and demonstrated a strong vein in contemporary poetry. – Tony Beyer in breath, a collection of haiku
The work in NOON is poetry tending towards the ideal condition of silence, which is a kind of music, and the visual element, not only within but in the space around each poem, is key to eliciting the quality of attention required from the reader when a poem places so much weight on so few words. – Billy Mills in Elliptical Movements
November 2025. 104 pages. 8.5 x 5.5 in/216 x 140 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-52-2 (paperback).
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Lindley Williams Hubbell: Selected Poems
The indefatigable Billy Mills has written a long and detailed review of the two Hubbell volumes: ‘Once again, I am indebted to Isobar, and Paul Rossiter, for broadening my knowledge of poetry, never having read Hubbell before. I share his hope that these books will bring him to a wider readership. Hubbell may not rank as a ‘major’ poet, but very few do. However, his body of work as represented here is significant, and forms an interesting extension to the story of American modernist poetry, particularly its relationship with Japan, which he extends beyond the boundaries of what might roughly be termed the Beat tradition. And in ‘Long Island Triptych’ he wrote one of the more interesting mid-length poems of the mid-century period. Read him.’ Click here to read the whole review.
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.
Hiroaki Sato: This generous selection from Lindley Williams Hubbell’s poetic œuvre 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.
May 2025. 264 pages. 9 x 6 in/229 x 152 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-50-8 (paperback).
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Lindley Williams Hubbell: Long Island Triptych
Lindley Williams Hubbell (1901–1994) received a Yale Younger Poets Award in 1927, and his work afterwards appeared from several major U.S. publishers. Then in 1953 he moved to Japan and liked it so much that he never again left the country, taking Japanese citizenship in 1960. Thereafter he published almost exclusively in Japan, and his work became lost to view in his own country.
His most significant book, the last to appear in the U.S. before his departure, was Long Island Triptych and Other Poems (1947). In this book – and especially in its title poem separately reissued here – he broke through from his early style of short, finely cadenced lyrical poems to an ambitious and original modernism. In an afterword, editor Paul Rossiter argues that this modernism was inspired by the work of his friend Gertrude Stein, and especially by her writings on Cézanne, Picasso and the cubists.
The three panels of the Long Island Triptych focus on three Long Island neighborhoods – Greenpoint, Ridgewood, and Glendale – and each includes a great variety of material contained within a formal structure as rigorous as that of an analytic cubist work by Braque or Picasso. In a late essay comparing Gertrude Stein’s work with that of the cubists, Hubbell states: ‘as the Cubist painter took an object apart and then reassembled the parts according to a completely autonomous sense of design, so she disintegrated her ideational content and reorganized it into a purely formal design’. This taking apart and reassembling of multiple viewpoints is what Hubbell does with his three neighborhoods. The result is a festival of particulars held in a multi-faceted unity by the overarching poetic form.
May 2025. 96 pages. 8.5 x 5.5in/216 x 140 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-51-5 (paperback).
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Paul Rossiter: Passages: Poems 1969–2019
Passages : Poems 1969 – 2019 gathers in one volume much of Paul Rossiter’s poetry, written over the course of fifty years in many countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It includes most of the poems from the five retrospective collections and two gatherings of new work published by Isobar Press between 2013 and 2021, together with some poems that only ever appeared in In Daylight and Monumenta Nipponica, both published in 1995. A few entirely new pieces have been added.
A quiet voice, all the louder for its quietude, Paul Rossiter’s is one of the most subtle, the most centred and most needed for turbulent times. – Marius Kociejowski
Paul Rossiter is a musician and a dancer. His footprint is human but a light one. He touches down in various places across a hemisphere, picks up on the sights and sounds, and plays them straight. His is a voice you want to keep listening to. – Laurie Duggan
The poems [in From the Japanese] are so tangible, clear and precise and I love the naturalness – like human speech – of the writing. And how real their concerns are. A lovely thing to have created such a book for others to walk into. – Lee Harwood
December 2024. 508 pages. 229 x 152 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-49-2 (paperback).
A review by Ian Brinton, Litter: Paul Rossiter’s monumental fifty-year collection of poems provides us with a memento written by ‘A passing traveller’ and they offer us, time and again, an echo of Pound’s Section:Rock-Drill cantos in which ‘autumn leaves blow from my hand’ and the light appears ‘almost solid’.… [The] sense of the manifest appears clearly on each page of Paul Rossiter’s Poems 1969-2019. Click here to read the whole review.
A review by BIlly Mills, Elliptical Movements: The observed world speaks for itself, on its own terms. In a poem near the middle of the book, ‘Beach’, he writes ‘’there’s no such thing as chaos’ and time and again the poems reveal the order in an apparently random world through a process of quiet transcription, an apparent minimal intervention into the flow of language that conceals a careful artistry. Click here to read the whole review.
Billy Mills also says (for which I thank him!): Regular readers of these reviews will be aware that I sometimes reflect on the history of non-mainstream verse. Reading Rossiter’s work, I’m struck by the fact that I’ve never heard his name mentioned in discussions of alternative British poetries of the last half century or so, never encountered him in any of the anthologies of this ‘other’ stream. Perhaps it’s because he started publishing late and has lived outside the UK for so long; I don’t know. Even the margins have margins, it seems. It would be interesting to see his work presented in a context that included poets like Frances Horovitz, Richard Caddel, Harry Gilonis, Colin Simms and others. Without going full on ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, I believe that consideration of Rossiter in that kind of context would both bring his work into focus and offer new ways to read the children and grandchildren of Albion.
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If you’re in Tokyo, the book is available at Books Kinokuniya Tokyo (near the New South exit from Shinjuku station), and if you’re in London, it’s available from the London Review Bookshop in Bury Place WC1.
Sanki Saitō: The Kobe Hotel: Memoirs
WINNER OF THE GREAT BRITAIN SASAKAWA FOUNDATION TRANSLATION PRIZE
Translated and with an introduction and notes by Masaya Saito
A companion to Selected Haiku 1933–1962, The Kobe Hotel: Memoirs, which tells the story of Sanki’s years of poetic silence during World War II, is a revised edition, with an informative new introduction, of Masaya Saito’s translations of Sanki Saitō’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 Tokkō ( 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 in 1975 : ‘I have no doubt that this is a masterpiece which will remain in the history of Shōwa-era literature.’
September 2023. 152 pages. 8.5 x 5.5in/216 x 140 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-45-4 (paperback).
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MASAYA SAITO WINS THE SASAKAWA TRANSLATION PRIZE!
The runner-up was David Boyd for a translation of The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada (Granta Publications).
Sanki Saitō: Selected Haiku 1933–1962
Translated and with an introduction and notes by Masaya Saito
Sanki Saitō is a towering figure in twentieth-century haiku. Although he did not begin to write haiku until the age of 33, he then rapidly became a leading figure in the poetically radical New Rising Haiku movement. He was silenced in 1940 when his writing caused him to be arrested on the charge of violating the Peace Preservation Law, but he began to write again after 1945, and between 1948 and 1962 he published three major collections of haiku: A Peach at Night (1948), Today (1952) and Metamorphoses (1962). Vigorous, earthy, observant, tragic, hilarious, sensuous, unillusioned, powerful, ironic – these haiku are among the major achievements in postwar Japanese poetry.
In Selected Haiku 1933–1962, Masaya Saito has vividly and powerfully translated 1,141 of Sanki’s haiku. In addition he has written a full and informative introduction, outlining Sanki’s life, describing his key role in the New Rising Haiku movement of the 1930s, elucidating the political and historical context in which he wrote, and discussing his mature postwar work.
Haiku, this oddball. Short and small, unfree, difficult, and its attractiveness supreme,’ began Sanki Saito’s account of his involvement with the world’s shortest verse form. Here Masaya Saito (no relation) has translated a selection of well over a thousand haiku of Sanki, illuminating the kaleidoscopic aspects of Sanki’s art. – Hiroaki Sato
An important poet deserving of this new exhaustive translation, made eminently more accessible by Masaya Saito’s painstaking biography. Often his own worst enemy, Sanki’s haiku plumb the depths of a turbulent, iconoclastic life during Japan’s embrace of modernity and war. – Paul Miller, editor, Modern Haiku
At a time when English-language haiku is exploring new directions in form and content, these fresh translations of Sanki’s haiku remind us that the seasons and their manifestations are, as he puts it, ‘nothing but the outermost layer of the truth of actual existence,’ and that it is the purpose of all haiku ‘to immerse ourselves deep in the truth of actual being.’ – Lee Gurga, editor, Modern Haiku Press
May 2023. 296 pages. 9 x 6 in/229 x 152 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-43-0 (paperback).
Click here to download a PDF of some pages from this book – haiku from the immediate postwar period, 1945 and 1946.
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‘There are many ways to approach this rich collection of Sanki’s work, perhaps the largest number of haiku by any modern Japanese haiku poet yet translated. It is a fine achievement, and clearly it has been Masaya Saito’s avocation to undertake it.…It is a magnificent collection.’– David Burleigh in Modern Haiku.
Simon Collings has published a review of Sanki in Litter, in which he says that ‘Sanki’s haiku, full of acute observation, emotional directness and humour, speak for themselves and are the best recommendation for why he deserves our attention.’ Click here to read the whole review.
Eric Selland: Brushwork
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)
September 2023. 88 pages. 210 x 148 mm. ISBN 978-4-907359-44-7 (paperback).
Click here to see a PDF excerpt from this book.
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LATEST REVIEWS
Peter Tasker has posted a marvellous review of Sanki’s memoir of his war-time life in Kobe, The Kobe Hotel: Memoirs (translated by Masaya Saito). ‘The experiences that Sanki relates are variously hilarious, absurd, poignant and horrific. The range of themes evokes Joseph Heller’s great novel Catch 22. The collection certainly gives a startlingly different perspective from the home front during the war. Forget about the Japanese propaganda slogans of “100 million with one spirit” and the like. Sanki introduces a cast of mostly penniless characters, himself included, who “believed that freedom, and nothing else, was the highest reason for living.”’ Click here to read the whole review.
Billy Mills has posted wonderful reviews of the three most recent Isobar books – John Gribble’s My Brother Goes Down to the Sea (‘There’s a quiet mastery … that stems from Gribble’s control of form’), Iain Maloney’s Mountain Retreats (‘[The] final lines from the sequence form a resolution that has been implicit all through … the ending is arrived at, not imposed’), and Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s Luna (‘[The] ability to make the extraordinary ordinary is at the heart of this book’s achievement’) – along with reviews of interesting pamphlets by Dag T. Straumsvåg (who I hadn’t previously heard of) and John Levy (who I definitely had heard of). Thank you so much for these, Billy! Click here to read the whole review; you’ll need to scroll down a bit for the Isobar volumes.
INFORMATION ABOUT ORDERING ISOBAR BOOKS
Click here for information about ordering Isobar books from Kinokuniya, for delivery to Ireland, and from Amazon.
NOTABLE REVIEWS
CLICK here to read REVIEWS of seven recent Isobar books: This Overflowing Light, Tre Paesi and Other Poems, An Open Parenthesis, Waking to Snow, VOU: Visual Poetry, Tokio 1958–1978, Wintermoon and Kusudama. REVIEWS BY Alan Botsford, Ian Brinton, Simon Collings, Gregory Dunne, Jennifer Harrison, Karl Jirgens, Judy Kendall, Louise George Kittaka, Kris Kosaka, Paul Miller, Billy Mills, Alice Wanderer, and Nadine Willems.
Ian Brinton on Isobar Press in The London Magazine
Ian Brinton‘s article about Isobar Press has come out on The London Magazine website. He summarises the history of the press, and writes very generously about Isobar books by Paul Rossiter (From the Japanese), Andrew Fitzsimons (What the Sky Arranges), Peter Makin (Neck of the Woods), Saito Masaya (Snow Bones), Naka Tarō (Music: Selected Poems, translated by Andy Houwen and Chikako Nihei), and with mentions of Woman in a Blue Robe by Yoko Danno and The Day Laid Bare by Kiwao Nomura translated by Eric Selland. Click here to read the whole article.
PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED
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