About the Book

This is Ernest Yatess eleventh volume of poems and the eighth volume in an ongoing series based on his wanderings through the streets of Philadelphia. Yatess turns through city streets recall the wilderness wanderings of Basho in seventeenth-century Japan, especially the wanderings of the river and mountain poets of Tang and pre-Tang dynasties of China.

The Poetic Approach

Receptive to his terrain as they were to theirs, Yates accepts the wildness outside, merging his imagination with it so that reading these poems is sharing in the mystery?the sublimity?of that wildness. That is why poems in this volume do not compose a discrete and grandly exotic music like that of Wallace Stevens; nor in their realism do they rely on a surrealist unreason; nor do they urge us toward stances of power, protest, or rebellion.

The Impact of the Poems

Instead, these poems derive impact from their tone of sublime mystery drawn from the sprawl and turbulence of a great citys streets.