Uji no Shi - Rimell, Bruce

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Résumé :
In the late 1990s, artist and poet Bruce Rimell travelled halfway across the world to live and work in Japan. There in his new home city of Uji, just south of Kyoto, he discovered a wonderful new world of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, as well as evocative myths and folktales, beautiful rivers and forested mountains. Losing himself in this ancient landscape, where the Uji River emerges from the mountains into a picturesque cultural scene, he soon discovered the traditional Japanese artform of the tanka, and he began writing these brief poems to reflect upon his emotional life, and to note his personal impressions of the historical region in which he lived. After two years in the country, he decided to return home to Britain, initiating a transformative period in his life. The tanka struck him as an appropriate way to record these changes, particularly as the medium commonly evokes traditional Japanese cultural ideas of impermanence, transience and the fleeting nature of moments in time. As he departed from Japan, and settled back slowly into British life, he mused upon sorrows of a life left behind, impressions of natural beauty and failed love affairs, all of which are enfolded into a collection of poems - in Japanese, but with English translations and notes - that represents an emotionally sensitive work of memory, of reminiscence, and of mono no aware, the 'sigh of things', the delicate knowledge that everything in this fleeting, floating world eventually fades and passes away....

Biographie:
Bruce Rimell is an internationally-exhibited visual artist and outsider poet from Leeds-Bradford in the UK. Previous publications include 'Echoes For Aphrodite', shortlisted for the 2024 Poetry Book Awards, and a chapbook 'Deo Mithrae' available through The Braag publishing. Forthcoming works include 'Vallum Aelium', a poetic travelogue to Hadrian's Wall, and 'Queeritudes', a small-scale series of narrative poems exploring the beauty of gay sexualities. You can discover his art and poetry at www.biroz.net, or search 'Bruce Rimell Xibalba Books'...

Sommaire:
Bruce Rimell is a British artist, poet musician, and independent researcher. Previous poetic works include 'Ta Sba Balamil Ta Ch'ulel', an illustrated poetic travelogue through the Maya cultural landscapes of Southern Mexico, 'The Fernal Songs', a body of queer, psychedelic and mythical song cycles, and 'Reveries, Dreams, Refractions', a poetic retrospective. His novella 'Hangman Starman', a visionary tale of idiosyncratic self-transformation from darkness to light is also available from early 2023. 'Nine Nights Awake' is his most ambitious poetic work yet: a wild, queer, epic autobiographical work. Forthcoming publications include 'Beeley Far The North', a poetic travelogue from travels in Northern Ireland, and 'Shapes of Shiny Brow', a surreal, semi-autobiographical tribute to the sixth century Welsh poet Taliesin. You can discover his art, and more about his poetry at the website www.biroz.net...