Nippon: Drinking Sake and Staring at Fireflies in the August of Cicadas

NIPPON is, on its attractive surface, the story of a man who goes to Japan from California to marry his beloved. While he is there, the two climb Fuji, wander about, watch a baseball game. And get married. Intricacies abound. The marriage will be between cultures, so the tone and word choice of the poem moves effortlessly between influences as supple and as primal as William Carlos Williams and Mei Sheng. There is another mix: a curious one of restiveness and calm providing a paradox: a yearning for what is there. Hayes draws the characters by what they do or what they choose to see, there is little descriptive prose. Parallelism returns to our poetry, Fuji seamlessly serves as a background and as a metaphor for the stages of courtship, and baseball, loved in both places, casts a benign shadow of Swallows and Giants, like a story children love to hear. The story is rounded with airplanes, those modern equivalents of flaming chariots, and the reader is left with images that are profoundly everyday while smoothly reflecting images that resonate like gongs in an unfamiliar temple. (Description written by Professor Daniel J. Langton.)