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.. |