In person, Hans Brinckmann is a dapper European gent with the patrician manner of the well-practised host or master of ceremonies. Reading this book of time-seasoned verse, one suspects that he would be equally at ease dressed in an Oriental quilt, a winter robe in the manner of that most sage of Qing scholars, Chen Fuyao.
A habitue of many world cities, Brinckmann's poetry has been fixed and fastened in the stream of time and material reality, the two great themes of verse. In terms of the potential for literary yield, there is something to be said for living a long life. And some poets, like the St. Lucia native, Derek Walcott, now in his eighties, just seem to get better and better. Brinckmann, who returned to Tokyo some years ago, a city he first knew in 1950, has been a poet, a human work in progress, for a very long time.
We all know verse to be the most demanding literary form of them all, a gruesome tussle with language, the chances of producing truly distinctive work, slim at best. Our appreciation of poetry, on the other hand, comes rather more naturally. Arguably, verse is innate, the music of our ancestors, a stream we do not return, but revert to.