Isobar Press

A Fire in the Head contains two complementary works, both of which emerged out of the aftermath of the March 2011 earthquake in Japan.The title poem-sequence takes the 5-7-5 form of the haiku to...

A Great Valley Under the Stars is the first book of poetry by Royall Tyler, the award-winning translator of The Tale of Genji, The Tale of the Heike, and other works of Japanese literature. Royall...

Peter Robinson (1953- ) is among Britain's internationally recognized contemporary poets. He has also had a long and deep relationship with Japan, the country where he would spend eighteen years...

Arc Tangent is composed of two prose-poem sequences, "Arc Tangent" and "Table of Primaries", hybrid works made up of prose, poetry and fragments collaged from a working notebook, and occasionally...

Beethoven's Dream completes the cycle of hybrid works which includes "The Condition of Music" and "Arc Tangent". As in these other works, Selland extracts fragments from a working notebook,...

In Dreaming of Zeus the Greek hunter goddess Artemis eliminates a photographer from her realm; Hera, the goddess of women and motherhood, enjoys a moment of repose in a tea salon; Persephone...

Not a book of English translations of Japanese poems (although it does include versions of haiku by Basho and by the contemporary haiku master Natsuishi Ban'ya), but rather a series of 'translations'...

In Kotan Chronicles, Japanese author and activist Genzō Sarashina shares his experience as a second-generation settler in Hokkaido during the 1920s and 1930s. Many of his poems document his...

In Kotan Chronicles, Japanese author and activist Genzō Sarashina shares his experience as a second-generation settler in Hokkaido during the 1920s and 1930s. Many of his poems document his...

Taro Naka (1922-2014) is one of the most respected poets in post-war Japan, having won several major Japanese poetry prizes. His poetry reflects his life-long exploration of Buddhism, traditional and...

"Peter Makin's precision in describing natural settings and phenomena, from the coast of Lincolnshire to Kyoto, either with the breadth of distance or as if through a magnifying glass, is remarkable...

The poems in One More Civil Gesture, the first full collection by C. E. J. Simons, frequently take their subjects from singularities of nature and art - things that are wonderful not because they are...

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...

Poems: New & Selected includes excerpts from Jane Joritz-Nakagawa's moving new poem, Plan B Audio, together with generous selections from her fourteen previous ground-breaking publications - ranging...

Between 1968 and 1978 Paul Rossiter lived in London, Tokyo, Scotland, and the English Lake District. Apart from three poems from 1969 set in Japan and collected in From the Japanese (Isobar, 2013),...

In Snow Bones "Masaya Saito...has crafted a masterpiece which illuminates further possibilities for haiku in English, crosses and perhaps eliminates the threshold separating the genres of "haiku" and...

'Something Other Than Other' is Philip Rowland's most representative collection to date. Ranging from minimal, concrete and found poems to epigrammatic reflections, imagist snapshots, haiku and...

Paul Rossiter's previous book, Seeing Sights 1968-1978, was mostly set in the mountains of northern England and Scotland; Ian Brinton described it as a 'beautifully crafted volume', with poems that...

Much of it composed during Peter Robinson's eighteen years living in Japan, The Draft Will brings together a selection of his experiments with the prose poem and an extended sequence exploring a...

The Insomniac's Weather Report, originally published in 2011 as the winner of the Three Candles Press First Book Award, explores the impermanent boundaries that define and - due to their nebulous...

When Denis Doyle arrived in Japan in 1987, he brought with him the manuscript of The Rhododendron Forest, consisting mostly of poems written in the previous few years in and about Cornwall. The book...

Il Porto Sepolto was written in the trenches of northern Italy while Giuseppe Ungaretti was serving as a private in the Italian army; when the collection was published in Udine in 1916, it changed...

In Underground Facility, as in C. E. J. Simons's first Isobar collection, imagined afterlives of Shakespearean characters bridge past and present: Oberon and Puck turn investment bankers, Gonzalo is...

The Tsurezuregusa is a collection of wise, witty, compassionate and, occasionally, cranky ruminations on the business of living by the monk, Kenko (c1283-c1350). The poems in What the Sky Arranges...

David Silverstein was a well-liked and well-respected figure on the Anglophone poetry scene in Tokyo in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Having already published his first book in Israel before he...

The poems in Woman in a Blue Robe consist of work written by Yoko Danno in the period 2002-2016. They range from short epigrammatic poems - sharply observed yet flavored with surrealism - to long...

World Without, the fifth collection of poetry by Paul Rossiter, gathers writing from 2008-2015. The title section of the book celebrates music, ancestors, places and occasions in Japan, England,...