The Poetry of Chiyo-ni

The Life and Art of Japan's Most Celebrated Woman Haiku Master

Author: Patricia Donegan, Yoshie Ishibashi and Natalie Goldberg

Hardcover

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31st July 2025

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Hardcover

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Description

'Patricia Donegan and Yoshie Ishibashi are to be deeply thanked for having given us with such articulate care a poetry major in any language and in any place or time.' Robert Creeley, poet

Chiyo-ni (1703-1775), also known as Kaga no Chiyo, is Japan's most celebrated female haiku poet. A student of Basho's disciples, she worked in an age when haiku was largely a male domain. As a poet, painter, and Buddhist nun, she lived a vibrant life while creating poems of crystalline clarity and delicate sensuality. This volume presents more than one hundred of her finest seasonal haiku, renku (linked verse) and haibun (travel poems).

The collected poems include:

morning glory
the well bucket entangled
I ask for water

a hundred gourds
from the heart
of one vine

rouged lips
forgotten-
clear spring water

These luminous, lucidly translated 'haiku moments' give the reader an intimate experience of Chiyo-ni's remarkable vision and bid us to stop and appreciate each moment of our lives. Handsomely illustrated with artwork by Chiyo-ni and others, the volume also includes illuminating essays on her life and art, informative notes, and a glossary of haiku-related terms.

About the Author

Patricia Donegan was a poet and translator. A professor of East-West poetics at Naropa University under Allen Ginsberg, she also studied with Japanese haiku master Seishi Yamaguchi. She received a Fulbright grant for her work on Chiyo-ni. She is the author of Haiku Mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness and Open Your Heart and Haiku: Asian Arts for Creative Kids as well as the collections Bone Poems, Without Warning, and Hot Haiku.

Yoshie Ishibashi is a researcher and the co-translator of Chiyo-jo's Haiku Seasons and The Classic Tradition of Haiku, among other works.

Natalie Goldberg is the author of 16 books, including Writing Down the Bones and, most recently, Writing on Empty (St. Martin's Press 2024) and Three Simple Lines: A Writer's Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku (New World Library 2021) which includes haiku by Chiyo-ni. Natalie lives in northern New Mexico and has practiced zen for many years.