The poet known as Basho was born Matsuo Munefusa in Japan, 28 years after William Shakespeare died in 1616 in England. Basho is a mystical meditative poet who wrote haikus, a poetic form of 17 syllables. He lifted the then ordinary form of haikus to a higher level; he could yoke the tiniest movement in nature to a clear image in the mind of man.

Basho was born to a Samurai family; he became a wandering mystic, studying Zen and Chinese poetry. Having embraced the simple life of a mendicant seer, he wrote haikus about the world he observed. And now in 2004, 44 Basho haikus are available on the Web. Anyone who can google, can find them.

Haikus are hard to translate, but these 44 Basho poems are crisp. Their effect is that of the stillness of a pond, during meditation. Here are a few representative Basho poems: “A cicada shell;/It sang itself/Utterly away” (tr. by R. H. Blyth). “Such stillness—/The Cries of the cicadas/Sink into the rocks” (tr. by Donald Keene). “A field of cotton—/As if the moon/Had flowered” (tr. by Robert Haas).

Basho has had devoted followers in the West, yet none are as taken by Basho as the Australian poet who imagines himself to be writing as Basho did. See The Basho Poems by Keith Harrison (The Cyathus Press, Iowa City, 1973; Nodin Press, Minneapolis, 1981; and the Basho section, “The Complete Basho Poems,” in Changes, New and Collected Poems, 1962-2002, Black Willow Press, Northfield, 2002, pp 372).

Haikus do not come naturally to Westerners who have not undertaken oriental/spiritual cultivation and practice. Occasionally one spots an exceptionally good one as in Keith Harrison’s own haiku: “Moonlight/floods my window:/ If a friend looks in tonight/He’ll darken me”(2002 version). The difference between Keith Harrison’s haiku and Basho’s is that Basho habitually transcends the self; modern poets writing haikus are likely to be self-referential.

At the same time, one of the pleasures of Harrison’s poems in Changes, New and Collected Poems is that one stumbles on poems that are some of the best written by a living poet in English. For example his longish Poem, “White Wave,” written in a variety of modes and moods (pp. 211-224), is extraordinarily affecting as we listen with him to the “screech-owl…the axle of the dark,” and if, the “day were any stiller, you’d hear the Black birds’ very thoughts.” Harrison is ten thousand miles from his birthplace, Melbourne, and he “marvel(s) with what dignity/My people let time wear them down” and he says to the screech-owl, “And if you screech again, dark bird, screech for the amazing fire/that crackles in your feathers, that scorches/The quick snake thrashing in your nails—/Screech for the fear of things lit up in the terrible/Flame of the sun, the night whose rivers/You ride among./But screech most of all for the marvelous strangeness/Of all creatures exiled under the moon/Who hunger to know themselves/And, damaged, do not wince and, desolate,/Do not break when the stones/cry out in the midnight wind….”

“White Wave” might have pleased Basho, who cautioned poets from being imitators. But what would he have thought of Harrison’s perfectly scanned, self-mocking love poem to a wife, entitled, “Song of a Lecherous Man”?

From my reading of his poems, it is evident that he knows the known poetry of the world (Basho would have liked that, for he urged people to study the ancients, but to use their own voice). Though Harrison is a wanderer who knows life in the wilds, he is also at home in the halls of learning, yet unlike Basho, as a modern, he also writes about childhood, and about the twists in the heart, about war, and about everyday displacements, themes that are not in Basho.

The Nobel committee will never see Harrison’s unsung work, for no fault of anyone. For one thing: the book lacks a good publishing house; the sequencing of the poems in the book makes the book resemble a beautiful woman with disheveled hair. For another, Mr. Harrison is caught between two worlds: he is an Australian who lives half the year in the US; he is not part of the club in either country, and the poetry clique will find him to be not playing the game.