The Day Laid Bare
Kiwao Nomura, Eric Selland (translation)In The Day Laid Bare, Kiwao Nomura takes us on a tour through hell on earth, much like Dante’s Inferno. The parades of flesh winding their way through Nomura’s poem are living creatures both human & non-human, or often subhuman, but who nevertheless ultimately embody the human condition. The title, The Day Laid Bare, speaks to human life stripped down to its most basic reality – vulnerable & powerless. The entire work is overshadowed by the colossal earthquake & tsunami which destroyed much of the northeastern region of Japan in March of 2011. Thus, although expressed in the language of the absurd & the Felliniesque, Kiwao Nomura’s The Day Laid Bare has an existential urgency.
Kiwao Nomura is a thrillingly unpredictable poet who never fails to challenge the limits of the possible & the linear. If indeed, as Pound wrote many years ago, certain poetry can resemble a ‘dance of the intellect among words,’ then we might think of Nomura’s work as a kind of tarantella, or perhaps a sword dance, or flamenco dance, or a rice dance. Satan tango? Quick step? Moon walk? Fire dance? Perhaps all, since Nomura is a poet of international range & address, a poet for whom the body of the poem is constantly dissolving & reforming in its path toward discovery of that sublime engine of perception, the ungovernable imagination. – Michael Palmer (author of The Laughter of the Sphinx)Eric Selland lives in Tokyo. He is the author of The Condition of Music, Inventions, & Still Lifes. Selland is co-editing an anthology of twentieth-century Japanese experimental poetry with poet & translator Sawako Nakayasu, which is scheduled to appear from New Directions Books in 2022. He makes his living as an independent translator of Japanese economic research reports.