Hiromi Ito's poetry is often described as "shamanistic," and indeed, according to translator Jeffrey Angles, when she performs her poems she sometimes "sits on the floor like a shamaness and raps on a drum." That sort of thing, along with the insistence — often asserted but seldom supported — that oral poetry is more authentic than poetry on the page, can grow tiresome pretty quickly. Unless, that is, the poet doing the drumming has real talent. Hiromi Ito, no bongo-beating poseur, does.
The first thing to note is that she has more than one arrow in her quiver. She does do shamanistic outpourings, but in addition she produces poems in an austere style that display considerable delicacy and finesse. "So as Not to Distort," for example, is a love poem, simply written, but never simply romantic. The woman narrating the poem, eating sweets with her lover, revels in their love but is also aware of the risks love entails:
Then the two of us