These in-depth, thought-provoking, and often funny posts are the brainchild of The Book Barn's very own Glenn. He never fails to make a great recommendation, useful warning or entertaining suggestion!
A Note Before the First. An index of Subjects. The subjects: 1: Kenneth Rexroth’s Classics Revisited. 2: The Tale of Genji. 3: The poetry of Daniel Huws. 4: The novels of Jonis Agee. 5: Five (or twelve) great mysteries. 6: The literature of the Blasket Islands. 7: Zen: Shunryū Suzuki, Robert Aitken, R.H. Blyth, and Brian Victoria’s Zen At War. 8: The letters of Van Gogh, Keats, Helene Hanff, and the Shaw-Terry correspondence. 9: The journals of Pepys, Thoreau and Dorothy Wor
#274: ON THE HAIKU. My discovery, made recently while reading Judi Dench’s book on Shakespeare, that the “golden lads” and “chimney sweeps” in the elegy “Fear no more” (in Pericles ) were Warwickshire slang for dandelions, in bloom and in seeding, was a lovely reminder that the great poems can be inexhaustible wells, to be read for new discoveries as well as repeated pleasure. Undoubtedly the most famous of all the great Japanese haiku is Basho’s verse about the frog: in ro
