BOOK REVIEW ©1996 Insight Publishing 

Title: Wild Ways: Zen Poems of Ikkyu
Author: Translated and Edited by John Stevens
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Format: 131 pages, soft cover
Reviewer: Elizabeth K. Wharton

The first part of this little volume is an introduction by the translator. Though brief, the anecdotes and information provided within it about Ikkyu's personal history provide an important context to the poems that follow it. Stevens tell us that Ikkyu is one of the great figures of Zen history. Raised in Zen temples from the age of five, by the time he was a teenager, he was known both for his mischeviousness and his seriousness about Zen. Both of these aspects of his personality are well represented in this delightful collection of poems, whose main themes are, in the translator's own words, "the unfettered Zen life and the joys of sexual intimacy."

I was surprised to find the latter theme represented at all in this collection of poems by a revered Zen master, and I'll wager that most readers will be. In addition, it is not just one or two poems that devote themselves to this unexpected theme, but a good half of the collection. Apparently, while in his 70s, Ikkyu fell in love with a blind minstrel and even fathered a child. These latter poems inspired by her are tender, full of happiness, and definitely explicit. While the poems dealing with Buddhism and the Zen experience seem sincere, the poems about his love affair are ones that live and breathe. Here, in these poems, he is not a figure from the fifteenth century, he could be any one of us.

While the poems in the first half of the book do a good job of capturing the Zen spirit, there are other poets who deal with the same theme at least as capably. What makes this collection stand out are not the poems about the bliss of enlightenment, but the odes to sexual love presented by the most unlikely of candidates..

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