Dumb Luck

From BooklistHamill has been deservedly praised for founding Copper Canyon Press, that excellent poetry publisher, and translating a lot of classical Greek, Chinese, and Japanese poetry and Taoist philosophy into vivid American English. His original poetry has been less acclaimed but shouldn't be ignored. Parts 1, 3, and 4 in this book show him in three different metiers--as a scholar of Far Eastern literature, as a late-middle-aged man, and as a person in the midst of life, surveying his past and hailing others' futures (e.g., in several wedding poems). Of course, his three spheres of activity overlap, and the wisdom of great Taoist, Confucian, and Zen masters crops up throughout the book, as do consciousness of his age and incidents from his particular life. Part 2 includes translations of the twelfth-century Japanese Buddhist nature poet Saigyo Hosho and two original haiku. Distinguishing everything here are a diction and a style that are utterly relaxed and companionable--like a brook trickling through a Buddhist garden, and just as restorative. Ray Olson