PHOTO SCROLLS: prose poetry with photograph
co-authored by Yoko Danno and James C. Hopkins
The IKUTA PRESS, 2020
Paperback, 140 pages
ISBN: 978-4-915813-22-1
Available from Amazon online stores:
Amazon.com,
Amazon.co.jp
Available also in Japan by writing to the IKUTA PRESS: ikutapress@aol.com
¥ 2,000 (postage included)
Further Center: Poems 1970 ~1998
by Yoko Danno
The IKUTA PRESS, 2017
"
Paperback, 200 pages
ISBN: 978-4-915813-160
Available via Amazon.com ($15.00)
Amazon.co.uk, and other e-bookstores
•In Japan: available by writing to the IKUTA PRESS:
ikutapress[at]aol.com
¥1,500 (postage included)
Grace Cavarieri's review in Washington Independent Review of Books
MANY THREADS: Invisible Children of Nepal
by James C. Hopkins &
The Ikuta Press, 2012
100 photos and a narrative poem by James C. Hopkins
Paperback, 108 pages, 204x260mm
ISBN: 987-4-915813-13-9
• $25.00
Available by writing to: Quilt for Kids Nepal
"Many Threads: Invisible Children of Nepal" is the story of life in a small community of Indian child-beggars, snake charmers, shoeshine experts, and quilt-makers living in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal. Descents of an "untouchable" nomadic criminal tribe, they have lived for more than 30 years in a hidden camp near one of the most sacred Buddhist pilgrimage sites in the Himalayas.
Told through the story of Puja, a 6-year-old former street beggar - and brought to life by the designs and colors of traditional hand-stitched quilts made by the women of the camp - "Many Threads" is a photographic glimpse into a world of at-risk children that is not often seen by outsiders. An unpredictable world, held together by sheer will, cunning, and bits of cloth - but a world where dreams still actually come true.
"Everyone needs a place to call home, even if you've never been there before..."
a sleeping tiger dreams of manhattan:
simultaneous poetry, photographs and sounds
by Yoko Danno and James C. Hopkins: music by Bernard Stoltz
(The book contains 12 poems, 12 black & white photographs, and a CD
with James and Yoko reading the poems in the book, set to original music
composed by the Washington, DC jazz and rock musician Bernard Stolts.)
The Ikuta Press, 2008, 38 pages
ISBN: 978-4-915813-11-5
Hardcover Limited Edition:
• ¥2,500 (postage included)
(hand-numbered copies, autographed by the authors)
Paperback Edition:
• ¥2,000 (postage included)
Available via The Ikuta Press
cold tea on an old boat
over your shoulder twinkling lights
where the city used to be how far we have come
along the sandy shoreline from the spirits-haunted castle
where we used to walk in the moonlit vinyard
now, there is only sea under a jeweled sky
and the whispering of waves where you are is where i am
we have new landmarks in wind, water and light
in the absence of towers where the needle points nowhere
the sextant is of no use yellow fish dance upside down
when the map is missing on the white coral floor
David Burleigh writes in the Asian Bookshelf, The Japan Times:
Each poem, jointly written, is printed on a single page, in two different scripts to distinguish the alternating voices. The first one, opposite a picture of a boatman on a lake in southern Asia surrounded by swimming ucks, is entitled “cold tea• A Latvian version of "a sleeping tiger dreams of riga" was published By Mansards, Latvia, in September, 2012.on an old boat,” and begins… Worlds apart, yet related by tradition
trilogy & Hagoromo: A Celestial Robe
by Yoko Danno
The Ikuta Press, 2010
Paperback, 94 pages
ISBN: 978-4-915813-12-2
Available via amazon.com
amazon.co.jp
In Japan available via The Ikuta Press
• ¥1500 (postage included)
About trilogy Charlotte Million says (News Register, MacMinnville):
Do not read these poems silently; they beg for a voice. Try not to read them alone - their power is expanded as they are shared. Simple poetry? Maybe. But her quiet forms are packed with fury and deep regard for the ultimate worth of the soul. After all, once immersed in the desperate business of life, one can never turn back, so one must move on. Yoko Danno says so.
Taking an anecdote from the 8th-century Fudoki (the same one used by the Noh play Hagoromo) Yoko Danno has crafted a six “scene” poem which parallels the well-known action (celestial maid loses robe to fisherman, dances, gets it back, disappears) with a series of three-line-verses which creates the inner responses (both his and hers) to what has happened. In the Fudoki she does more than dance. She marries him and has his children and only then returns to the heavens. Each scene is a monologue in which the tension between earth and heaven is expressed. The content, however, is quite modern since the plight of celestial maid is a paradigm for that of women everywhere.Timothy Harris writes (Asahi Evening News):
Her Hagoromo is based on the same myth of the celestial maiden who has her robe of feathers stolen as the Noh play - hough in the case of the version Miss Danno uses, the celestial maiden stays on earth for many years as the wife of Ikatomi before returning to the heavens. What impresses me about this poem is principally Miss Danno's imaginative penetration of the mind of a woman -we seem to touch the very quick of the female sensibility as the seasonal labors of a small Japanese village are evoked through the eyes of a being who only vaguely remembers her life in the heavens and is unable to explain the fragmentary memories that suddenly occur to her. The poem would be just as remarkable if it had been written by someone whose native tongue was English.
OEDIPUS AT COLONUS by Sophocles
English Version by Lindley Williams Hubbell
The Ikuta Press, 1978
Chapbook, 26 pages.
• ¥1,500 (postage included)
Available via The Ikuta Press
Excerpt:
Scene: Colonus, near Athens. A sacred grove dedicated to the Eumenides.
(Enter Oedipus led by Antigone)
OEDIPUS: Antigone, faithful daughter of a blind old man, what country have we come to now, and among what people must we beg our way, asking little and getting less? But a little is enough for me. I have learned to be patient. If you see any place where I can sit down, lead me there, for I am tired, and while I am resting ask the passers-by, where we are.
ANTIGONE: The city is far off, Father, and this seems to be a sacred grove. The laurel, the olive and the vine grow here, and among the leaves the nightingales are singing. Sit here on this stone. You must be tired, we have walked a long way.
THE SUPPLIANTS by Aeschylus
English Version by Lindley Williams Hubbell
The Ikuta Press, 1986
Chapbook, 26 pages.
• ¥1,500 (postage included)
Available via The Ikuta Press
Excerpt:
Scene: A sacred precinct in Argos. In the center an Altar. Statues of the gods.
Several young women enter, rush to the altar and take hold of it, claiming sanctuary.
CHORUS: Zeus, god of sanctuary,
look down upon us, protect us.
Wind and water have brought us here from Egypt.
We come as refugees, having done no wrong,
to escape the indecency of our uncle,
Aegyptus, who tried to make us marry his sons,
our own cousins.
So we have come back
to our ancestral soil, holding in our hands
the wands of suppliants.
THE TEN AVATARS OF VISHNU: A Cento
by Lindley Williams Hubbell
The Ikuta Press, 1978
Chapbook, 28 pages.
• ¥1,500 (postage inclued)
Available via The Ikuta Press
Sources:The Book of Common Prayer, Bhagavad Gita, Hindu Mythology, A Guide to Earth History (Richard Carrington), King James Bible, The Culture of Ancient Egypt (John A. Wilson), Iliad, Odyssey, Metaphysics (Aristotle), Isis Unveiled (Blavatsky), Kojiki (English, French and German translations), Theogony (Hesiod), Fragments (Hesiod), L'apre-midi d'un faune (Mallarme), Double Triptych (Lindley W. Hubbell), Ramayana, Symposium (Plato), Symposium (Xenophone), Dhammapada, Development of Mahayana Beliefs (Yamaguchi Susumu), Buddhism in China and Korea (Tsukamoto Zenryu), Buddhism in Tibet (Lobsang Phuntsok Lhalungpa), Islam, etal.
TRANSLATIONS: from The Pyramid Texts, The Book of the Dead, Sappho, The Greek Anthology,
First Rime (from the Spanish of Ruben Dario), To Goethe (from the German of Bayard Tayler),
To the Divine Eleanora Duse (from the Italian of Gabriele D'Anunzio)
by Lindley Williams Hubbell
The Ikuta Press, 1983
Chapbook, 18 pages
• ¥1,000 (postage included)
Available via The Ikuta Press
Excerpt from The Book of the Dead:
I am the past and the present, and I hear
within me the power of the second birth.
I am the hidden spirit from which the gods come forth,
and I nourish with holy meats the inhabitants of heaven and hell.
I am the golden rubber of the sky, the god with two faces,
light streaming from both.
I am the lord of the resurrected,
he who comes forth out of darkness.
CZERNY
A book of prosody in verse
by Lindley Williams Hubbell
The Ikuta Press, 1981
Chapbook, 12 pages
• ¥1,000 (postage included)
Available via The Ikuta Press
Excerpt:
1
Though earth
and bushes
be both
auspicious
the flower
of cactus
is rare
in practice.
2
My gold fish thrive
my cacti live
and I survive
but my azalea
is a failure.
The English Lyrics in the Seventeenth Century
By Lindley Williams Hubbell
The Ikuta Press, 1981
Chapbook, 47 pages
• ¥1,500 (postage included)
Available via The Ikuta Press
Essays on John Donne, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, Francis Quarles, etal.
trilogy:
1. winter journey 2. song of destruction 3. dance of fire
by Yoko Danno
2nd edition
ISBN: 4-915813-09-3
The Ikuta Press, 2004
Paperback, 53 pages
• ¥1,500 (postage included)
Available via The Ikuta Press
Lindley Williams Hubbell writes in the forward of the book:
Her poetry is at once imagistic and abstract: imagist because it consists almost entirely of images: abstract, because the coherence of the images is emotional, not discursive... H. D. gives us direct treatment of the object: arose, a wave. Yoko Danno gives us direct treatment of the subject: herself. H.D.'s images relate to a definite topography. Her rose blooms in a real garden, her waves crash on a real beach. Yoko Danno's images are autonomous. They are like Marianne Moore's real toads in imaginary gardens.
FOUR SONGS
by Yoko Danno
The Ikuta Press, 1982
Pamphlet, 12 pages
• ¥700 (postage included)
Available via The Ikuta Press
Four Songs: Flight, Diving, Six Garland & Flight is reprinted in
The International Anthology of Poetry and Prose 47
by New Directions, New York, 1983)
Portraits '78:
by Yoko Danno
The Ikuta Press, 1980
Pamphlet, 10 pages
• ¥700 (postage included)
Available via The Ikuta Press
Portraits in New York: Richard, Victor, Anna, Lotte and Hanna
Dusty Mirror
by Yoko Danno
with drawings by David Kidd
The Ikuta Press, 1977
Paperback, 74 pages
• ¥2,000 (postage included)
Available via The Ikuta Press
TRILOGY: Io and Prometheus, The Dream of Europa,
The Tears of the Muses
by Lindley Williams Hubbell
The Ikuta Press, 1977
Chapbook, 29 pages
• ¥1,000 (postage included)
Available via The Ikuta Press
The Shakespeare Apocrypha
Fourth Edition
by Lindley Williams Hubbell
The Ikuta Press, 1977
Chapbook, 20 pages
• ¥700 (postage included)
Available via The Ikuta Press
A Restaurant with Many Orders
Ihatov Fairy Tales
by Kenji Miyazawa, with the original illustrations by Takeo Kikuchi
Translated by:Sachiko Ohi and Yukiko Sekiguchi
The Ikuta Press, 1991
Hardcover, Limited Edition, 138 pages
• ¥2,000 (postage included)
Available via The Ikuta Press