TWELVE VIEWS FROM THE DISTANCE, by Mutsuo Takahashi, translated by Jeffrey Angles. University of Minnesota Press, 2012, 243 pp., $19.95 (paperback)

This remarkable book is an autobiography of childhood, written by the poet Mutsuo Takahashi (born 1937) when he was 32, and issued in 1970, although its separate chapters had appeared as a series of essays in a magazine the year before.

Translated now for the first time, it greatly enhances our understanding of both the man and his work.