The Ink Dark Moon [antikvár]

Introduction The two poets whose work is collected in The Ink Dark Moon are central figures in the only Golden Age in literary history in which women writers were the predominant geniuses: Japan's Heian era, which lasted from 794 to 1185. One no Komachi (834?-?) served at the imperial court in the capital city of Heian-kyo (present-day Kyoto) during the first half century of its existence; her poetry, deeply subjective, passionate, and complex, helped to usher in a poetic age of personal expressiveness, technical excellence, and philosophical and emotional depth. Izumi Shi-kibu (974?-1034?) wrote during the time of the court culture's greatest flowering; a woman committed to a life of both religious consciousness and erotic intensity, Shikibu explored her experience in language that is precise in observation, intimate, lyrical, and deeply moving. These two women, the first a pivotal figure who became legendary in Japanese literary history, the second Japan's major woman poet, illuminated certain areas of human experience with a beauty, truthfulness, and compression unsurpassed in the literature of any other age. As do the words of Sappho, Catullus, and Dickinson, in whose company they belong, their brief poems serve as small but utterly clear windows into those concerns of heart and mind that persist unchanged from culture to culture and from millennium to millennium.