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This wonderful book consists of 100 tanka in the strict traditional form of five lines of five and seven syllables, thirty one syllables in all, and a short diary written by the (fictional) author of the poems, a Japanese American daughter of Hiroshima survivors. The poems are responses to the 100 cases of the classical Zen koan collection The Blue Cliffs Record (“Little Cliffs” is the name of a canyon in San Diego where the actual author, Paul Naylor, lives and hikes regularly). As a long-time student of Zen literature, I appreciate the way this text updates and naturalizes the old koans, without, of course, trying to. A serious Zen adept and koan student, Naylor puts his whole heart into this writing, that is witty, intelligent, and spiritually apt.
Norman Fischer, poet and Zen priest, author of Through A Window, There Was A Clattering As…, and Selected Poems, 1980-2013.
“Along the foothills / of the Wasatch Mountains, I / found the pronoun me,” writes the student of koans who composes this collection of tanka and prose poems. The “me” of the book is not the “me” of the author whose name appears on the cover and who grew up near the Wasatch Mountains in Utah, but of a Japanese American woman student of zen whose parents survived the atom bomb blast and moved to San Diego. Sharing a birthday with the author (I’m guessing), she struggles to open keys to the koans of the Blue Cliff Record, a 12th century Chinese collection of 100 zen koans. In an email to me, Naylor writes that this book could be titled “Why Paul Flunked Koan Practice.” S/he live beside the Little Cliffs, where s/he hike. The Cliffs themselves offer lessons, one of which is a misprision between “blue cliff” and “little cliffs,” between ancient China and contemporary San Diego. “Between” genres, genders, binaries, books: the chapters between sections are inevitably called “Between.” If Naylor and his narrator don’t “cure the ego disease,” they manage to leverage it (so to speak) into spiritual, political and linguistic wisdom.
Susan M. Schultz, author of I and Eucalyptus and War Diary, among many others.
The Little Cliffs Record is Paul Naylor’s tenth full-length book of poetry—following Playing Well With Others (Singing Horse Press, 2004), Arranging Nature (Chax Press, 2006), Jammed Transmission (Tinfish Press, 2009), Book of Changes(Shearsman Books, 2012), Anarcheology (Talisman House Books, 2018), Luminous Ruse (Tinfish Press, 2019) Not Quite Noon (Dos Madres Press, 2020), Little Cliffs (BlazeVOX Books, 2021), and Mingling Among (BlazeVOX Books, 2023). He is also the author of Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History (Northwestern University Press, 1999), a critical study of five contemporary poets—Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Lyn Hejinian, Kamau Brathwaite, and M. Nourbese Philip. He lives in San Diego with his wife, Debi, and daughter, Siena.
Book Information:
· Paperback: 96 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-553-3
$18
