This Overflowing Light: Selected Poems, Rin Ishigaki (edited and introduced by Janine Beichman), Isobar Press, 2022, ISBN 978-4-907359-41-6, £15.04

With the publication of Rin Ishigaki’s selected poems, Isobar Press continue my education in 20^th century Japanese poetry. Ishigaki’s story is a peculiarly Japanese one, it seems to me. Born in 1920, she seems to have had a conventional enough Shinto upbringing with one exception; from an early age she wrote and published her writings in magazines aimed specifically at young female writers. As she did not collect any of these early poems, they do not feature here.

As was the case for so many of her compatriots, defeat in 1945 changed everything as she discovered that all she had been brought up to believe about her country was built on lies.

She had, by then, been working in a bank for a number of years, and under…