I Didn't Know Kyoto

Sheppard Ranbom reveals-through his romance with Japan-how memory and imagination can produce moments of clarity that illuminate our failings and desires, our search for beauty through suffering.I composed these poems in a Japanese style, favoring immediacy, brevity, and unabashed feeling, to evoke loss and the fleetingness of life. The style also accentuates the intuitive and impulsive aspects of human nature, which can take instantaneous measure of the world and reveal facets of experience and ourselves we tend to hide. Though my own work originates more in memory than in the moment, no matter the language of creation or approximation, or differences of belief, or the gulf across years, poetry has one mission: to speak to and through the heart. (from the Afterword.)