Smoke Signals • William Elliott, long-time friend and translator (with the late lamented Kazuo Kawamura, most recently of New Selected Poems, 2015) of the Japanese poet Shuntarō Tanikawa, writes: In the modern period of Japanese poetic volcanic eruptions, the latest was on 15 December 1931, at the birth of Tanikawa Shuntarō, poet. That eruption carried straight through 13 November 2024, when Tanikawa-san died in Tokyo at ninety-two of natural causes. He is survived by millions of readers. The kamikaze winds that once carried suicide pilots have continued blowing, sifting the poet’s engaging ashes everywhere across Japan (and much of the globe). There will be no let-up in Tanikawa’s presence. He remains a household word. Not incidentally, he is partially enurned in a Carcanet volume.

My poem ‘Shun Remembered’ was written in January 2020.

You lived in a plague of words;
spent decades swatting them away like gnats.
Now we can answer your life-long question,
‘Where do words come from?’
They came, as they have always come,
from ‘that world’ where you are now;
that world of the eloquent silences
that lay between the words of your poems.
We are still stilled by those silences
that you would say are the pulse of your poems.
Words come. Words go. Your silences remain.

I wrote this elegy in advance, alert to the possibility that I might precede Shun in death or be otherwise incapacitated, in which case Nishihara-san would respectfully pass it along to Tanikawa Kensaku-san. The elegy ‘Anoyo’ was composed after the poet’s death.

Smoke rose in a pattern of puffs
quickly read by the tribe across
two creeks and the plain, a mile distant:
Return – the order understood.
An ill elder had now set out
on his journey to the spirit world.

The cursive hiragana text
curling up from the distant stack
read that Shuntarō had entered
another phase of his journey
on the narrow path to distant
anoyo, where words yield to silence.

Kawamura-san died in 2015. Our colleague Nishihara Katsumasa took over and we continue translating. The translation of ‘Shun Remembered’ is by Nishihara Katsumasa.

(Shuntarō Tanikawa also composed the lyrics for the Astro Boy theme song and translated Peanuts into Japanese. His 1952 debut, Two Billion Light Years of Solitude, considered the cosmic in everyday life and was ‘sensual, vivid but simple in its use of everyday language’. It preceded Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and like it, though not on quite the same scale, became a bestseller. He translated Mother Goose and Maurice Sendak.)


Born To Be Wild • New Zealand poet John Gallas remembers Fleur Adcock (1934–2024). Thursday 17 October. Sunny and warm. 2pm, a Requiem Mass for Fleur Adcock. Her street, one corner away from the church, is comfortably quiet. A large cheeseplant stretches over her upstairs window.

All Saints’ Church, East Finchley. A full complement of friends, neighbours, acquaintances and admirers. In the vestibule, a screen-show of photos from Fleur’s life: baby, teen and grandmother; Aotearoa/NZ and England; cigarettes, flares, parties, beaches, holidays, children, readings and honours.

The service is ritual, the content and music chosen by Fleur. Hymns, prayers, liturgy, psalms, homily, offertory, breaking of the bread, Communion and commendation.

Before the final prayers come the reflections and readings of family, friends, her publisher, academic-friends and a reading of ‘Dragonfly’: memories written by her sons, Greg and Andrew (read by wife and niece), Mia (niece), Sarah Duckworth, Marilyn Duckworth (read by Mia), praise and tales from Neil Astley, Janet Wilson, Julian Stannard, and lastly ‘Dragonfly’ (read by Lorraine Mariner).

The coffin, topped with religious and family items – a crucifix, a transistor radio – is carried away by Mia, Sarah and Angela: an image of bravery, family togetherness, mourning and pride that will remain, unforgettable, with all who were there.

Fleur was cremated at Islington Crematorium Chapel.

On the way back to East Finchley tube station, I saw a van parking in the spot directly outside no.14 Lincoln Road: it was ‘Bright Builders Ltd’, and the radio inside was playing ‘Born to Be Wild’.

Now time to read, or reread. Start with the three poems included in the first Poetry Nation: ‘Richey’, ‘The Voyage Out’ and ‘Holiday Diaries, 1845 and 1971’. Knowing, of course, wonderfully, there are a few hundred more.


Old news is new news • The enigma of a lead coffin discovered beneath Notre-Dame may have been solved. The tenant of the sarcophagus could be the great French Renaissance poet Joachim du Bellay (died in 1560). Traditionally the occupant had been identified as ‘the horseman’. The Smithsonian Magazine disclosed the discovery in September 2024. The sarcophagus, one of a pair, came to light in 2022. The other had the name of the dead man conveniently in an inscription. It was Antoine de la Porte, a priest who died aged eighty-three. Du Bellay was more reticent to disclose his identity but the magazine reports that ‘Several compelling clues led the researchers to link the horseman to du Bellay. The poet’s equestrian abilities are well documented: He once “rode from Paris to Rome, which is no mean feat when you have tuberculosis like he did,” said a biological anthropologist at France’s University of Toulouse III. “In fact, he almost died from it.”’ In PN Review 33, C.H. Sisson wrote about du Bellay and translated twenty sonnets from The Regrets. He quotes from Spenser’s translations from the Antiquitez, noting that Spenser in The Ruins of Rome turned du Bellay’s Italian into English sonnet form:

Behold what wreake, what ruine, and what wast,
And how that she, which with her mightie power
Tam’d all the world, hath tam’d herselfe at last.
The pray of time, which all things doth devouwre.

Oulipo loses a crucial syllable • Le Monde reported: Jacques Roubaud, the French poet and ‘mathematician of words’, and a key member of the Oulipo group from 1966 on, who was awarded the Prix Goncourt for poetry in 2021, died in December at the age of ninety-two years. He was a master of the poetics of wry restraint, a figure more approachable than many other Oulipo writers because of his sense of play with fixed form including the sonnet, the renga and the sestina. Strict forms require the most intense creative effort within language. One of the founders of Oulipo, Raymond Queneau, drew Roubaud into the centre of the group. He was an active translator from many languages – translation providing to the serious craftsman some of the strictest constraints and bringing into the host language compelling, not always familiar resources. His own formal inventions include the ‘trident’, the ‘joséfine’, the ‘mongine’ and other forms closely related to his first discipline, mathematics. One of the best ways into his work is the 2016 Gallimard ‘anthologie personnelle’, Je suis un crabe ponctuel, bringing together material from 1967 to 2014.


Nikki Giovanni • Also in December one of the key figures in American Black arts died, Nikki Giovanni. She was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1943, and brought up in Cincinnati, Ohio. Yolande Cornelia ‘Nikki’ Giovanni grew up with other writers and artists affected deeply by the white terrorism that led to the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott and the civil rights movement. In the six decades of her writing career she composed over fifty titles and miscellaneous works – poetry, essays, children’s books. Her poetic career began with the self-published Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968), paid for by her grandmother. It was a success and led to her rise in literary and political fame. She went on to be a finalist in the National Book Awards and a poet laureate. Syreeta McFadden described her as ‘a disruptor whose sensibilities as a writer were informed by her deep knowledge of history and the struggles of the civil rights and Black power eras. She used lyricism and poetry to capture the ups and downs of African American life in the late twentieth century, providing her students a blueprint to channel language, to dream, to shake up the world.’


Piedad Bonnett • In November Queen Sofia of Spain conferred her eponymous Iberoamerican award for poetry – the twenty-third – on the writer and dramatist Piedad Bonnett of Colombia. The presentation was made in the Hall of Columns at the royal palace in Madrid. Bonnett is widely celebrated in Latin America and has been translated into Dutch, French and other languages of Europe. One of her best-known works, from 2013, was her account of the illness and suicide of her son in Lo que no tiene nombre. In accepting the award, she ended her moving account of the necessity of poems, if not to change the world, then to broaden our sense of it and our abilities to respond to it. She ended with lines of verse in memory of her son who died thirteen years ago.