“It is refreshing to come upon a man who can write both lightly and profoundly and who can mingle tenderness and humor without losing the force of either.”
+ Springf’d Republican p9a N 14 ’20 380w
“It is not a story with a pattern, but there is a frame to it that gives it bounds and a focus that gives it coherence; there is sunlight in it—the pale northern sunlight of Scotland. The characterization is clear and the more pungent for its tolerance.”
+ The Times [London] Lit Sup p633 S 30 ’20 470w
NOGUCHI, YONÉ (MISS MORNING GLORY, pseud.). Japanese hokkus. *$2 Four seas co. 895
20–20445
The hokku is the seventeen syllable poem of Japan which the author describes at some length in the preface. This preface is in itself a prose poem in its quaint English and with the vista it opens into the Japanese mind. The real value of the hokku, we are told, is not in what it expresses but how it expresses itself spiritually: not in its physical directness but in its psychological indirectness. It is “like a spider-thread laden with the white summer dews, swaying among the branches of a tree; ... that sway indeed, not the thread itself, is the beauty of our seventeen syllable poem.” Of the translating of the hokku the author says, it is like the attempt to bring down the spider-net and hang it up in another place. The epilogue is a reflection on the introduction of western civilization into Japan.
“‘Japanese hokkus’ is remarkable for at least two reasons; one, because its poems are of that sensitive and illusive loveliness that is rare in the realism of contemporary publications, and another because the book links the literature of the Orient and the Occident rather more than any other poet whom we recall.” K. B.
+ Boston Transcript p7 O 2 ’20 1100w