When a fan of the neglected American genius Guy Davenport wrote to tell him that she admired his ability to express himself, his response was: "Yick!" Davenport's reaction — somewhere between bemusement and horror — upon learning that anyone could so misunderstand his art, and, indeed, art in general, seems apposite in considering the work of Takashi Hiraide whose "For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut" has more in common with the cool integrity of the best work of poets such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Guillaume Apollinaire — modernists, one and all — than it does with versifiers who appear to believe that writing is a way for them to work through the emotions that wash over them when, say, the sun sets behind bare trees, the seasons change, or a dog dies. Readers willing to leave all that warm fuzziness behind will enjoy the linguistic and conceptual fireworks, the wit, and the mystery that make Hiraide's Walnut a poetic page-turner.
Like much of the best work done in this poetic tradition, "Walnut" is a collection of fragments. The shortest of the 111 numbered sections is three words; all but one of the poems are compact enough that they can fit two to a page. Some surrender their meaning without much of a struggle; none are blunt enough to be boring.
There are bits, for example, that seem to come from the poet's life, such as No. 14: "Today, with a triple hangover, I slowly pedaled and pedaled my wobbly bicycle, like / a mist, past a back alley that murmurs condolences." The play on the Japanese word for hangover, "futsukayoi" — literally: "second day drunk" — is obscured in English, but even those with only barroom Japanese will suspect that it's lurking there in "triple."