Names and Rivers

The expansive, philosophical poems in Names and Rivers: Selected Poems by Shuri Kido consider themes of solitude, time, and “naming” through close attention—fueled by both scientific knowledge and awe—to geological forms and rivers. According to co-translator and scholar Tomoyuki Endo’s substantial introduction, Kido, an eminent writer known as Japan’s “far north poet,” draws on his “geographical imagination” to engage with “time as an encompassing palimpsest.” In “The Title Lost,” Kido considers the “Fossa Magna” (a lowland rift), a major geographical element in Japan’s topography:

                                                —Fossa Magna
The monotonous scenery shimmering.
Coming along, but
                                “Atopos = ‘without a place’ = atopy”
When the name of a place is lost.
That’s what “poem” is.

            v

Dawn, 
                     investing the land with color, without intention.

The invocation of the valley and the arrival of “Dawn” feel directly drawn from life, from an individual moment, yet this moment also exists in a mythic or continuous time, in which dawn itself arrives over and over, “without intention.” 

Co-translator Forrest Gander, in his preface, notes that he and Endo agreed to “avoid the kind of translation that tries to stuff the glorious difference of another language’s features into the polished shoe of conventional English,” and the effect is a slightly unconventional use of syntax and sentence, which, as evidenced in the selection above, adds a dynamic dissonance without compromising the poem’s communicative clarity. 

The titular “rivers” are a site of reckoning with time and with notions of “home,” and a standout section, drawn from the collection The Illusory Mother, recounts Kido’s trek “from the mouth to the head of the Kitakami,” the river of his “homeland.” In “Ritual Utensils,” the second person subject feels “removed” from their “own origin,” and the narrator points out, “In such moments, / people like to see headwaters.” The poem provides no arrival or epiphany, closing with these spare lines:

When you cross a river,
everyday scenery blurs out,
though sometimes you manage to see
yourself.